SO HERE IS WHAT I PROPOSE ON THIS MOMENTOUS OCCASION:

IF YOU ARE READING,

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THANK YOU ALL FOR BEING A PART OF MY LIFE, AND THANK YOU NOW FOR ALLOWING ME INTO YOURS.

I WILL TRY NOT TO BE SICK TOMORROW. AND I WILL PROMISE TO RETURN TO NORMAL CAPITALIZATION. HEH. THIS IS A LITTLE PAINFUL ON THE OLD RETINAS.

We had a budget worked out ahead of time. It was, I think, a very reasonable and generous budget. More than enough for a kid’s birthday party– roughly a monthly car payment. And I told him let’s sit down, let’s make a gameplan, let’s figure out what things cost and what we want, etc. And that didn’t really happen. What did happen is Jason kept bringing ideas to me. Like, “We should do hot potato with Bob-ombs!” and “How do you feel about a warp pipe coin toss?” and “PINATAS for EVERY! KID!” Most of his ideas sounded cool. I’d be like, “What will this cost?” and he’d say, “Not too much. It should only be [insert lowball figure] for the [insert only one or two necessary goods to complete the project].” Like the warp pipe toss? “It should only cost two dollars a pipe.” Which was technically true. For the PIPE, it was two bucks a piece. Times four pipes. Plus three dollars a paint can, times multiple paint cans. Plus a tarp to spray paint on so it doesn’t stain the concrete. Plus a board to attach the pipes to, plus glue or nails to attach them with. Plus plus plus.

CASE IN POINT: these invitations? If you broke these invitations down– between specialty paper, the cutting board, the cutting tools, the tape, the four ink cartridges we went through, the glue– it cost over eight dollars AN INVITE to actually create.

I’ve been keeping him updated on, like, what we have left in our party budget– and then how much over we are– and then I’ve been trying to talk him down on things, like do we REALLY need this part of the obstacle course? And what could be a cheaper way to accomplish your vision? I hate being the bad guy, but a lot of times I’m just like– I just have to totally nix things. I know the buzzwords now. It Would Be Really Cool If… means that it will cost over a hundred dollars and require fourteen hours of manual labor. ANYTHING that would be really cool is not going to happen.

SO. Today. Today Jason went out with the kids, which was really nice, and did some more party shopping. I have a head and chest cold, so I stayed in bed watching our DVRed premiere of “The Killing” (PS: EXCELLENT AS ALWAYS, AMC). He came back. He made a joke about owing me a Visa gift card that’s supposed to be coming in the mail. I was like WHAT DID YOU BUY. And he was like, “The things we talked about. And thirty dollars worth of tools.”

“Why did you…” I began, and I felt, like, that chest-tightening. Like: No. Don’t start. You won’t be able to stop. “I thought you were giving me that gift card already,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But you can have it now. I went a little overboard.” He’s all light hearted. I’m about to strangle something.

Jason doesn’t see the problem. We have money, we spend money. There’s always money in the bank. There is magically always money. He goes out to lunch and there’s always money. He wants a video game, and there’s always money. That’s because I’m behind the scenes; saving, cutting coupons, investing, recycling, finding freebies– you know. HANDLING the money. That’s why there’s always money there. And even though our income has obviously gone up over the years, we’re not getting ahead if we’re spending everything we make.

I’m emotional about money, too. Like, spending money: dagger in my heart. Jason is emotional the other way. He loves spending it. He loves buying things, loves shopping, loves nice cars and nice clothes and big parties and big presents. And I know– I know this party is not just about dropping cash, but about indulging his creativity. And I know I’m lucky, because I get to do that whenever I want. I have my writing, and I get to enjoy sharing that with people on a daily basis. And he spends his days working in IT. Which he likes, but it’s not his hobby. Part of the reason he gets SO into these parties is because they give him an opportunity to work with new media, to build things, to get innovative. I don’t want to squash that. But I also can’t afford every brilliant idea he has.

ALSO I’m of the opinion that you can either throw money at a problem, and spend less work on it (like buying a cake versus making one), or you can throw time and effort at a problem and less money. But what we have here is– more work AND more money. It’s like a lose-lose. It’s the worst of all scenarios.

(And the GAS. Oh God. Driving around town to multiple stores only to forget something and have to go back the next day? With THESE gas prices? And with his car, which only takes THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAS? Like, add on another six dollars a trip just to get there and back.)

Okay. Sorry– I’m done complaining. I just needed to vent a little. I know I’m sick and overtly grouchy, and I know it’ll be worth all the headache in the end. On the positive side, so far every single guest is coming. And– hopefully– Elias will remember this party the way Addie remembers Disneyland. Heh.

And. I do have to admit: his work is pretty incredible. Despite the cost, despite the stress, it’s amazing to see Jason’s visions coming together. Case in point is his under construction Bob-omb:

I’m sure the Bowser Castle Tower he’s building will be equally impressive.

Okay, so– off to finish sewing coin bean bags and baking cupcakes. (The cupcakes aren’t for the party, heh. They’re just because I’m cranky and starving.)

AND. Why do romances use swelling music to heighten to a moment’s emotional impact? It just seems so cloying. Any time a character gave a speech of any weight, they would cue the ballad. And then they would cut to Anne’s watering eyes. Like: You should be crying now too, audience. HINT HINT.

I sat through the whole thing with Jason– all three hours of it, which is how long it took with constant child interruptions– and then I went in here to write this, and he just turned on ‘Gangs of New York’ in the background. SERIOUSLY? He knows I love this film. I am literally finishing this season of ASW with some of the historic Five Points gang battles. Why did we even bother with ‘Love and Other Drugs’ in the first place if this was the follow-up? And why is he watching this the minute I can’t see it from the office?

(I love Daniel Day-Lewis in this movie. He could have literally been the entire film, the gangs and New York and all of it, and I would’ve been fine.)

(I’m so distracted now.)

Um, what else. Not too much. Got paid an advance for some web work, which was awesome and unexpected. Got a Kohl’s gift card in the mail, which was also unexpected (because I forgot I won it, heh). And I had an early morning conference today with Addie’s teacher. That girl is making incredible strides in school. This is her first all A’s report card, so I was thrilled. Super proud. “Everyone loves her,” the teacher gushed. “Now that she’s stopped– you know. Hitting them.” Heh. Oh, and going full circle back to the movie: Addie’s teacher? Looks totally like Anne Hathaway. Which was a little awkward tonight during the graphic sex scenes.

(Oh, and also, a big shout out to Ali; who I love like she is Diet Pepsi embodied. Not only did she have a hand in my Federated Media recommendation, she’s just– like, if you have Ali in your corner, you don’t need anything else. She’s it. She is a network of support and advice and help and gossip in a tiny charming package.)

That’s it. That’s this whole entry. Just lots and lots of love for the amazing women in my life. I’m so blessed.

I did no research or cost comparisons of cell plans, so I decided to play it safe. Rather than jump into a contract blindly with a better phone, I’ll just eat the money for a cheaper phone and upgrade later. I just need it to turn on and dial 911, basically. And Michelle and Jason.

ANYWAY. Went to Best Buy. Saw the normal $25 Go Phones are on sale for $9.99– which includes $15 of airtime. So– this is, like, the best deal ever. I buy one. Go home. Turns out the minutes and the charger work on another, better pay-as-you-go phone, which I shelled $50 out for one time and promptly forgot about for six months. So I have a new charger, a phone with all media and internet capabilities, and $15 of airtime for only $10.

I’m all excited that I saved this money; right up until Jason said I really need to look into that 90,000 mile maintenance on the Ford. Like, I should try and get that done before the trip. Ask Google what that will run. Google says anywhere between $500 and $3,000.

Are you kidding me.

Okay, so. Yeah. I don’t know if that’s happening. Heh. Not in the next couple days, at least. I changed the oil already and I’ll have a few other things taken care of, but all that ish can wait. I am way too stingy.

In other skinflint news! Jason colored my hair tonight, which cost us a whopping $0. I sent away for a free coupon on one of those Saving Moms sites, and it came a couple weeks ago. It’s some kind of foam thing (I threw away the box: poor foresight). I chose blond. I just figured it would be the most noticeable. He did an awesome job getting it on, and we watched ‘Survivor’ while it set.

(I just realized I typed “he did an awesome job getting it on”. That is probably the most unintentionally sexy thing I’ve said about Jason on this site.) (I’m commenting on it before one of you guys do. Heh. BEATING YOU TO THE PUNCH.)

Here I am, all product-saturated:

Here I am, post-drying:

I decided to curl it, to see how it looked when styled. It was just kind of dark orange otherwise. (Also, check how honest that photography is. The stuff on my cheek is a nightly face mask.)

Ta da!

Eh. I look about ten pounds heavier in this one than the rest of the set, but at least I’m not cross-eyed. Heh. That is a very real problem when I take self portraits. I don’t know what goes wrong.

Yep. That’s it. Not a terribly exciting day. But a terribly THRIFTY one, at least, and that counts for something.

So anyway, I barely got any rest. Wake up. Kids are sick. HALLELUJAH. I can go back to bed. I give them medicine, cereal, and put the TV on. Nap. Get up, pick up the house. Reply to emails. Read the ASW message boards. Pull up Photoshop, work on some ideas for Ali’s site revamp. Break up constant background fights. They’re so grumpy when they’re sick; it’s like that stereotypical “she frowned at me so I teased her so she hit me so I pinched her so she broke my toy so I threw her Barbie in the toilet–” and I’m just like, “SEPARATE ROOMS.” I know I got a brief rest, but Mama’s still too tired for all that ish. Play nice, please. And they need drinks, and snacks, and toys, and life is boring and this house sucks. I know, guys. Trust me. I wish you were at school, too. God love them, but we both have different agendas today. And mine is: handle business. And theirs is: have Mom entertain my every whim.

Talk to my sister. No baby yet. Contractions, but not long or constant enough. She is done being pregnant. She is SO DONE being pregnant. She didn’t know how done she could be but she’s there now. She thought she escaped the bloating and stretch marks and now it finally happened. I’m like, “TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW GURL.”

We pretty much just call to GURL at each other all the time. That’s literally how we answer the phone. It isn’t even Hello anymore. It’s just “GUUUUURL!” (Which is actually a tremendous improvement over how I used to answer her calls, which was: “What’s up, Spank Bank?”) (I kid you not. I accidentally said it once, and Michelle replied that it was the most inappropriate nickname I could’ve given her. So. Naturally, I kept it.)

More emails, more work tinkering. Buy a little mold online for the Mario party. Kids are hungry again and fighting. I’m fading. There’s not enough caffeine in the world.

BUT! CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS, IT’S ABOUT TO GET GOOD!

I guess the Universe heard me lamenting yesterday and decided to throw me a bone, because just when I was about to write this afternoon off as a loss, something amazing happened: Federated Media contacted me! Totally out of the blue. They’re starting up a parenting blog program, and apparently– they liked my site, and they wanted to include me. I’m trying not to act like a tremendous nerd, and play this off, but it’s a HUGE AWESOME DEAL to be recognized; particularly by such a well-known company. Really humbled, really stoked. Hopefully I’ll get a little more info about it in the coming days, but it’s supposed to launch early May. My only fear is that I’ll have to move the site back onto a self-hosted WordPress– which isn’t a huge problem, I have hosting; it’s just making sure my server is cleaned off and behaving first. Another thing for the to-do list. Heh.

J gets home, I tell him my news. Jason fills me in on his day. Oh! I forgot to tell you the best story yesterday (I was too busy being bummed). Steven Beaver accidentally sent a text to J that was intended for Hannah! Bwhahaha. Unfortunately, it was just romantic, and not sexual in nature. I guess we’ll never know what wildly inappropriate things Stephen texts.

Um– let’s see. Sorry. I lost my place. So Jason is home, we talk, take the kids to Moe’s. Eat Moe’s. You know the drill. Stop at Party City and Michael’s for supplies. We want to do a hot potato game with a Bob-omb. Our initial plan was to actually create a wind-up Bob-omb that would tick and “explode” when the kids were holding it. Unfortunately, the time just isn’t there to build and test prototypes. It looks like we’re just making the Bob-omb itself, and using Mario music. I told Jason to pick up a ball and chain decoration from the prisoner Halloween section for a bomb base. I was pretty proud of that contribution.

Kids fall asleep in car. Jason drives around to like eight RedBoxes, looking for a Blu-Ray copy of ‘Tron’. I agree to this jaunt as long as we can keep playing “Hands Down” on repeat.

Everyone who ever mentioned wanting to meet or hang out probably just recanted their offer at that last paragraph. Heh. They’re like, “Driving around to Walmarts, looking for TRON, listening to Dashboard Confessional? WHAT.”

We don’t find the Blu-Ray. Go home. Put kids in bed. Jason goes on RedBox, reserves a copy in a neighboring city, goes back out. Jason makes an illegal turn on a red light IN FRONT OF A COP. Cop pulls him over. (I hear this story afterward, when he comes home like twenty minutes late.) Cop is like, “Have you been drinking?” and Jason goes, “Only this.” and points to his water. Cop: “What just happened?” Jason: “I don’t know. I blanked. I saw the green light, the guy next to me went– I didn’t realize the mistake until after I was turning.” Cop: “Sit tight, sir.”

So J turns the car off and waits, and the cop runs his license, and Jason says for a minute he has this fear that the Infiniti dealership forgot to change ownership of the vehicle to him, and it would look stolen. Something would go horribly wrong. But instead the cop comes back, hands him his license, and was like, “Your record is absolutely spotless, so I won’t ruin it for you tonight. Watch where you’re going from now on.”

Jason was like YESSSSS, and he promises to be good. When he’s telling me this story, he’s like, “Can you BELIEVE it? Can you fathom that this situation even occurred? Me? Almost getting a TICKET? For not paying attention?” And I’m like:

EIGHT YEARS I’ve been telling this dude to look out through intersections. EIGHT YEARS. I am totally that wife in the passenger seat like: “It’s not green, baby. It’s NOT GREEN BABY. IT’S– OKAY, SLOW. DOWN.” Heh. I’m just glad he’s okay. But surprised? I’m surprised HE’S surprised, frankly.

but ever so often I’ll stumble onto an article about another zombie novel getting published, and it will leave me deeply and profoundly disheartened. The ache seems to cancel out all the good in everything else for a moment, and there’s just this left: I really thought it would have happened by now.

Just kind of down on myself tonight.

Our original intent was to make kind of a crazy interactive invite:

Which had a Shy Guy who could be pulled with the coin out of the Warp Pipe. But we both didn’t like how cluttered it became visually. Just because you CAN, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Heh. So we ended up dialing it back a bit, and making it just an awesome pop-up. We’ll save the warp pipes for the obstacle course that’s in the works.

Final version of the invitations:

The obvious difference is the cleaner, simpler look; which I prefer. J cleaned up the pop-out “Elias is Turning 8″, too. If you’ll notice, it actually has this beautiful printed drop shadow on the layer behind the words. It’s a subtle thing, but definitely enriches the overall aesthetic.

Overhead:

This is one of the things he managed in Illustrator on the first try: after popping up, the backgrounds align from all angles.

Front:

Back:

I censored a bit of the information just to be safe. I know the vast majority of regular readers here, but every time we create themed parties, there’s an influx of new Google visitors. So. You know. Just to be safe. (It’s not you I don’t trust; it’s Internet. Heh.)

Anyway. I have to get some rest– another big day of work tomorrow. More party stuff, making changes to Ali’s site, scheduling Eli’s follow-up surgery at Duke, plus school and fundraiser and travel headaches. Plus a new (amazing!) ASW chapter. Plus swim lessons. SWIM LESSONS, oh gosh. I almost forgot. Seriously, I tip my hat to these moms and dads who have their kids in multiple extra-curriculars at a time. It’s all I can do to get one kid to a weekly event, and still have food on the table and clean clothes in drawers.

(Also: SEE HERE AND HERE. In case there wasn’t any humor gleaned from that.)

(Now that I had to explain it, it probably wasn’t as funny. But I about died.)

ANYWAY. So. I spent the last like three hours trading messages with Meg about Henry Cavill’s WonderCon panel. And Henry Cavill in general. And also Meg has a nice voice, so we talked about that. Heh. Before that, I spent the day with the kids. We had a Monkey Joe’s party in the morning to early afternoon.

Yep, this is what Michelle has to look forward to for the next ten years at least. Heh. NOISE. ACTIVITY. Saturdays sitting at a plastic indoor picnic table, trying to keep a head count of a multitude of children, making sure nobody is having bathroom accidents or throwing up or hitting anyone or trying to escape or breaking their arms or wandering into a stranger’s party and stealing pizza. I told her about it later. “Welcome to your FUTURE,” I told her.

“It was nuts?”

“It was, like, madness. It was like–”

“SPARTA,” we both said at the same time, and started laughing. (I know, we’re just walking pop culture references. DEAL WITH IT.) “Please tell me someone fell into a inflatable well,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I answered. “There was a lot of victory shouting going on.”

I’m making it sound worse than it was, probably. It went pretty well overall. Riley was with us (I’m sure you noticed we had an extra kid in the photos), and she and Eli played together pretty much the entire time. Addie found a Disney Princess bounce house and refused to leave. She would just lure friends in. It wasn’t until the last five minutes that she realized that there were, like, six OTHER bouncy things, and by then it was too late. I needed to get home. The walls were closing in on me, and I was DONE.

We kept Riles here till dinnertime, and then both families went out together to Red Robin. It’s Preston’s 4th birthday, and Garrett just passed a big test at work. So it was a celebratory thing. Ate my second veggie burger of the day. Delicious.

Came home. Addie cried for four hours on and off. I don’t know what’s up, exactly. It’s a separation anxiety that’s come out of nowhere, and she’s afraid I’m going to leave her. All the time. Even when I’m holding her, or two feet away. “I MISS YOU!” she howls. And she seriously HOWLS it. I feel kind of bad, because I started giggling, and she was like BWAAAAAHHHHHHH I’M SERIOUS, but her crying isn’t like normal kid crying. She just opens her mouth as wide as she can and makes noise, and tears come out of her eyes. It’s like being screamed at with sadness. (I’m laughing so hard writing this. It’s true, though.) The more angry-howl-open-mouthed she got, the more I was like, “Please don’t look at me.” And then she started laughing and crying at the same time, which was like: I lost it.

Kids. I don’t know. I guess Michelle has moments like that to look forward to, too. Which is still loud nonsense, but at least it centers around the fact that someone loves you.

PS: I never participate in April Fool’s, because I’m very gullible and try to avoid situations where it’s exploited, but I ended up posting this Ikea video on my sister’s FaceBook today– which is a complete spoof, and I only shared it to be funny. So it ended up in a handful of people being like WTF! THIS IS NONSENSE, IKEA! and even my sister, who WORKS. AT. IKEA, calling me during the day; like, “Is that FaceBook thing real, or…? Because it seems kind of ridiculous, but I’m going to check the catalog here.” I’m like, HOW DID I TRICK YOU GUYS? This wasn’t even a PRANK. I need to actually make an effort next year; I might be good at this. Heh.