Delphine is Five

Delphine turned five this Saturday, and we had a party on the deck. Delphine invited five of her friends, and between food and cleaning up and decorating and games and loot it was almost as much work as a grown-up party. But now the house is clean! Ish.

The night before her birthday, Delphine slept over at Baba and Zaida's house. Baba wanted to take Delphine to Science Rendezvous in the morning, and I had a book club meeting Friday night, so a sleepover was advantageous for all.

Saturday dawned bright but not as early as usual; we had put Cordelia down early on Friday so between that and not having Delphine around to wake her, she slept in until 7:45. (Did you know if you put your kids to bed earlier they sleep later? Weird but true.) We got up and leapt into action; Blake and Cordelia picked up flowers and bread and pickles, I cleaned up and made egg salad and iced cupcakes and put up the daisy decorations Delphine had made. After lunch we put Cordelia down for an early nap, and Auntie Morgan came over to help out.

The party started at 2:00, and Delphine only got home a few minutes before that in time to put on her new red party dress. All the partiers arrived on time —Ursa, Erika, Tina, Sydney, and Athena, and four out of the five Mums stayed, which was cool; also in attendance were Baba and Zaida and Auntie Morgan and Uncle Erik — and we got into the swing of things: crafts, a treasure hunt (the treasure was wrapped boxes of Nerds), some dancing games (they didn't seem to enjoy those much), Pass the Parcel (that was a huge hit), and of course little sandwiches, chips, cake, ice cream and jelly (Jell-o, except made with real juice). (That was a really long sentence with altogether too much punctuation.) There was a good bit of random running around the backyard, too, which was more popular than I expected.

Delphine mostly had a good time — she got mad at me when I didn't take her suggestion for a music game (who knew "Row Row Row Your Boat" was even a game?) but otherwise it was nice. There is some weird bullying/power abuse going on with one of the girls and we tried to ameliorate that as much as we could, but Delphine wasn't directly involved so it didn't seem to bother her. We'll have the "victim" over for a playdate sometime to make her feel more welcome and loved. (She — the victim — is a very intensely affectionate little girl, and that annoys the others a bit, and so they are mean to her – they say she can't play with them. Not surprisingly she's also intensely emotional so she takes it seriously when someone says something hurtful. It's a mess; I'm so glad I'm not a little girl any more! That sucked!)

Anyway, apart from that the party was a hit, and Delphine got some great presents and had a lovely day.

In addition to turning five, she has also grown two centimeters in the last month, and she can now read upside-down. Well, she can't properly read books and stuff, but she's getting pretty good at picking out individual words as long as their spelling is "standard". I guess the memorization of non-standard words really begins once you start reading in earnest and encounter those words more. (Although of course she can read "one" and "two" which are non-standard, so I guess she has already started to build up that database.) She's working on learning to ride a bike without training wheels, and to skip. Five is going to be a very exciting year!