One of the best parts of parenting the pre-K is eavesdropping in on your little budlings’ creative play (less enjoyable parts being such things as getting kicked in the liver when your toddler dances ATL-style Crunk, etc.).  Mystery of mysteries.  Why, for example, is the first thing Toe makes in the kid kitchen always a pewter Thai Saki bottle of “P.U. Stew” which he devilishly forces me to drink before my first morning coffee?  Wherefrom, for example, did the lads extrapolate that the tub in the darkened bathroom is really a DC3 “Moonplane” headed for space, and that in order to make it go they will need 1. Flashlights 2. Plastic mixing bowl helmets and 3. A large sleeve of Townhouse crackers (and dare I tell anyone, they are EXACTLY right…shh!)

Roo is in love with a young couple named Mommy and Daddy who drive a burnt sienna metallic dune buggy back and forth to Mexico.  Their rumble seat is filled with kids (whale, dolphin and seal bathtub squirties), by the way, who sometimes are forced to ride on the hood.  He takes them everywhere: he’s just three, so this means the living room, the upper bunk, the hallway, the kitchen, under the dining table.  Roo is apparently unphased by the bloody lip and bruises on Generically Military Doll Daddy, nor does it seem extraordinary to him that Sea World Trainer Barbie Mommy’s eyes are bigger than her feet and breasts are larger than her…seals.  They talk, they travel, they minister to animals and children compassionately in exotic locales that live only within the mind of Roo:

Barbie Mommy:  “Daddy, fix Tricer’tops!  Awww, sad!”

Military Daddy:  Dispassionately pets Triceratops horn.

Barbie Mommy:  “No good!”  Throws her whole upper body over T-tops head and wraps her arms around his frill.  “Soooookay, soookay.  Poor kids!”

Military Daddy:  “Let’s go to Mexico!  Looking for polar bears babies.  Animals in trouble!”

Barbie Mommy:  “Hello, Mommy!  Grab the egg!”

Play family, including squirtie aquatic children are somewhat roughly loaded into buggy, tiny toy dinosaurs jammed onto laps and into cargo spaces, buggy goes flying off across dining room floor at breakneck speed with a forceful shove of Roo’s foot.  Various animals (also a large pink fishing pole and bucket) topple out along the way and are left behind, dangerous highway debris.

Can anything I have ever read or seen before  compare to such poetry?  Longfellow's cathedral of the trees, Whitman's Song of Myself, Anne Sexton's In Celebration of My Uterus?

I.                     I, SPY:  OVERHEARD WHILE LUI (Loafing Under the Influence)

OR Nurse:  When they page you to the family waiting room after her surgery, you have 10 minutes to get there or else.

Hub: Or else?  Or else you’ll give her to the next person waiting in line?

Hub:  She loves that $5 watch, but if you should happen to “lose” it…

Nurse:  Do you need your glasses?

Me: No

Nurse:  Do you need your cell phone?

Me:  No.

Nurse:  Do you need another heated blanket?

Me:  No.

Nurse:  Do you understand what I am saying?

Me:  No.

Nurse:  Okay, she’s ready.

Hub (on phone):  Crap!  The house gets dirty fast when she’s on drugs!

Toe:  Why can’t we play Jumpy Slide on Mommy’s belly?

Hub:  Okay, boys, I know we don’t normally eat dinner in the bathtub, but…

Me:  What’s that tubey thing?

Anesthesiologist:  Don’t worry about it.  The only thing you need to know before surgery is…

Me:  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

II.                  GUILT-FREE TV

Prior to surgery I was promised a post-op experience of endless sugarfree fudgesicles and the freedom to watch ad nauseum “me” TV on DVD in my bed (we cleaned out the library before Cutting Day).  True, I was tantruming at the time, swearing to cancel surgery and run off to die on an ice floe under the Cayuga Bridge rather than go under the knife, and Hubby was grasping at straws.  Turns out though, I am one of those lucky people whose body has trouble metabolizing the general anesthesia and so go through days of fluctuating consciousness and gripping nausea.  I have only been aware enough in the last 3 days to take a moment from rest for vomiting and blogging, occasionally to read books to my children on the bed (although Toe and Roo both noted the “stories” were somewhat convoluted) and to ask Hub to please kill me with my Louisville Slugger. 

So, here’s all I got.  I did get to see the worst movie ever, The Invention of Lying (and there is no way I am giving you a link to that), whose premise turns out to basically be that religion is the original big lie that ruined everything for mankind.  Also, a documentary/reality show about Alaska that was pretty much me fast-forwarded through scenes of freezing hungry people killing small animals and stewing them.  Finally, Season 5 of The Office, sheer mindless bliss, funny and I don’t remember a word of it.

III.                    Oh, no…

I don’t know where you put your money, but pay up.  I lived.

Back when I had Toe and Roo by c-section, surgery was performed pretty much in a sterilized cave with the highest ranking medicine man fashioning medical tools out of bone and giving me a stick to bit on for “anesthesia.”

There’s cool new stuff, now.  Hubby and I were by far most impressed by the new Bair Paws surgical gown (apart from our wide-eyed awe over the Bollywood movie starlet beauty of my surgeon, Dr. Nakib) which was a delightful purple with a breakaway chest for impromptu thoracotomies and vacuum holes all over to provide heating and cooling compartments right in the gown.  Chilly?  In pain?  They hook you up to what looks like a canister vacuum and pump in the pleasing warm air.  Feverish, overheated?  They can hoover in some AC too.  The gown, along with the gently massaging automated leg wraps and the maternal OR circulating nurse (stroking my hair, calling me sweetheart, bringing me cotton balls drenched in my favorite essential oil of peppermint for my aromatherapy pleasure) all made it closer to a day at the spa than anything else.  Well, except  for the cutting and the bleeding, the trachial discomfort from the intubation, the moaning in pain and the blank white worried stare of my Hub.  Plus, the surgery costs about 16,000 times the amount of spa day...

It went pretty well, and now with my newly bionic bladder part I, I should have the superhuman strength to hold my pee for, say, 56 hours.  Bring on the lemonade!

And thank you, for all the prayers.

The lads are bundled and off for fun at Tante Katy’s house, the fridge is stocked with moron-proof meals (I love you, Hubs, but let’s keep it real!), the house is scoured, the dogs are suspicious, the die is cast, and I am GO for bionic bladder surgery in 3…2…1…

I got the awesome alternative-ingredient dessert book BabyCakes    for Xmas from my mother-in-law, and I am now officially the best “baker” in the land (note quotes, hinting that I am really not making this claim as truth, but only dreamily asserting myself as “baker-like”).  If you are looking for a sugarfree, non-dairy, flourless, eggless, vegan, dye-free healthy quasi-cupcake that looks like an adorable little flower and tastes like heaven:  ME .  And since in my house (oh, shut it , Dr. Phil!)cake=love (Shhh, I’ll tell you a secret.  I adore my children.  And my husband.  And my dogs.  Sometimes I wish I could fly above that love, cold and aloof, alone with a good solitary tragedy and only my hot coffee for warmth.  Maybe farm my love out to staff.   But no.  God giveth, and giveth and giveth.  It may not be the Holy Spirit talking, but I say, let them eat cake…), there’s a whole lotta happy around here.  Roo:  Mommy, wowwwwwww!  We eat cake more!  Toe:  Mommy, you wanna make-a chocolate cake with pink circles, pleeeeeease?!?!?

Grandma Bobo (my mom) would be so proud.  I learned to make fancy cakes (and purchase love with baked goods) from her as a wee lass.  She was an oil painter in her Original Life (before having six kids, and let me tell you, we messed that up goo-ood), and her cake decorating was obviously an outlet for her thwarted artistic energies.  Paisley cakes, cakes that looked like princesses floating in hooped flowing skirts of organza, tiered cakes cascading with rosebuds and forget-me-nots.  And they tasted good too (which I think was maybe easier to accomplish with pounds of unsalted butter, whole milk and triple-refined cake flour, I’m just saying).  That was Mom, armed with shiny steel Wilton tools and a vision, God bless her buttercreamy soul.

Dogs are pretty good as sidekicks go.   Well, maybe when you compare them to the other famous sidekicks in history like Tonto, Robin, Ed McMahon (or, for my eldest niece, her Blackberry), they come up a wee bit short.  Still, the loyalty thing is there.  And that “throw-myself-in-front-of-a-bullet-to-save-you” adoration.   There aren’t too many bullets flying around the BCD neighborhood these days (yet), but you know what I mean.  Skeeter is definitely on duty, preparing for danger. Vicious strays, errant bears, rabid squirrels, falling icicles, aggressive solicitors, Mormons.

 You may know, Tovi and Skeeter have a tempestuous relationship at best.  A  history.  Skeeter, my firstborn son and original sidekick will never quite forgive me and Hubby for bringing this unpredictable and ill-behaved (not to mention hairless) little puppy home to forever displace him.  Skeeter has been on constant watch over me for 6 years, my own little secret service agent, starting when he camped out next to my pregnant belly in 1994 when unborn Toe’s toe poke out at him.  Wary of what the creature brutalizing me from within might mean, things between Toe and Skeet escalated from there.  Tovi bites Skeeter,  Skeeter  bites Tovi.  It’s all very Sinead O’Connor.  A shameful, petty, unholy war.

Enter the book Officer Buckle and Gloria.  If you’ve ever doubted the power of literature to change a life, note this example.  

Tovi loves this story about a goofball cop who teaches safety to kids with his beloved  sidekick, a dog named Gloria. The book gave Toe and Skeeter the gift of a compulsive safety they could pursue togheter.  A new beginning and way to bond (and also, a new way to channel the presence of my late father*).   Tovi enlisted Skeeter as his partner in enforcing a pantheon of numbered safety tips in the BCD house (Safety Tip #1 being:  Don’t bother Skeeter).  Equipped with badge, homespun manual of Safety Tips (Safety Tip #77 Don’t touch a lightbulb or it will Zzzzzap! you!),  and Skeeter as the real force behind the operations, (the mandog behind the curtain if you will).  Tovi is learning safety and mending fences with the best Terrier ever. 

So, there they go, into the fray.  Mommmy’s protectors, finally a team.  At night they snore side by side, sleeping the sleep of the assured (although Skeeter admittedly with his “radar” ear pricked and one eye open).

* Walter Braun Sr., lifelong champion of Rules and Orderly Practices.  He taught us to safety-proof and weather-prep vehicles.  Not just to turn off but also unplug anything with a heating element before leaving the home, if only for an hour.  Originator of Triple Checking.  Etc.  Dad was a career safety inspector for the MN Highway Department, making sure a 10-ton International tractor-trailer loaded down with concrete brick didn’t topple on your VW Rabbit, so be thankful for him and his compulsion.

Since Xmas is over and the ground is still too frozen for camping, MN is bored and irritable and spoiling for a fight, so you know what that means!  Yay!  Winter Carnival!

This is the first year the lads will experience the frozen insanity which is the SPWC, and we are looking forward to introducing them to the main pillars of the event.  As responsible parents, we want to make sure we cover all angles of this most important pageant in our civic culture...






I.  The Krewe
If you grew up a girl in St. Paul, chances are you’ve been smeared with a sooty “smooch” from of one of these fire-worshipping loons.  Ah, the Vulcan Kiss, a tacky rite of passage that only occasionally results in a lawsuit.  We take them  in stride—red-caped, medieval ritualistic pyros.  That is just one of the things I love most about my hometown.  When a party is involved, we try to be hospitable to everybody! Check out the crazy quotient on this.  The Vulcan Krewe consists of:
aPhetuses Rex ("The Vulc") The true king--or anti-Boreas--of the Carnival
aGeneral Flameus ("Flame") Keeper of the Flame.  Basically, your furnace guy
aThe Duke of Klinker ("Klink") The Fire King's aide de camp (yah, what?)
aThe Count of Ashes ("Ash") The "Swinger" of the krewe (aka: liquor store guy)
aThe Prince of Soot ("Sooty") The oldest member and self-proclaimed "ladies man."  If you see him coming, run.
aBaron Hot Sparkus ("Sparky") Stoker of Emotions, "spark plug" of the Krewe and rabble rouser
aCount Embrious ("EB") Youngest of the Krewe, name is cruel and self-explanatory
aDuke Fertilious ("Ferty") Minister of Propaganda and Porpagator of Progeny



III.  The History
It's cool when your hometown is kind of ballsy.  In 1885 when some hotshot New York reporter called St. Paul "another Siberia unfit for human habitation," we said, bite me NYC!  We're going to roast weenies right out on the tudra, host parades and build a friggin' castle (that's right, a CASTLE) out of the polar ice cap in our own back yards.  Just for fun, we're going to invent our own fur-clad royalty, too, and our pretty girls are so hardy they will waltz around in silks and tiaras right out there under the windswept aurora borealis.  Hah!  And to save face we've been doing that for about 122 years. 




IV.  The Royals
Minnesotans of my generation were brought up to have their brush with majesty.  Princess Kay of the Milky Way at the Dairy Barn--or least the butter sculpture of her.  Charles and Di getting hitched at 3 a.m. STP Time on the portable black and white our moms propped up on the kitchen table next to the coffeepot for the event.  My own grandmother worked for the Pioneer Press back in the 70s and knew the enigmatic King Boreas personally--even helped him write the medallion clues.  She said she could never let me meet him or reveal his true identity though--otherwise she would have to kill me. Yah, Gram's in hell for sure.  Anyway, what's a party in the snow without a princess all dressed in sparkles?  What's a bitter cold nightime parade without a burly bearded laplander-esque king in a Russian ushanka?  Or at least an imposingly built and mature African American hottie (and it's about time, Minnesota!) in a commanding uniform. Bring on the pomp, Northstar style.



V.  Fire and Ice

Isn't this really why we go?  Ice slides and ice palaces and ice skating and ice sculptures and racing on frozen lakes and ice fishing contests and Norhtern Lights and all the twinkly crunchy crackly brilliance of this barbaric climate we call home. Brrrrrr!  See you today at the King Boreas Grand Day Parade, 2 p.m.!

Isn't this really why we go?  Ice slides and ice palaces and ice skating and ice sculptures and racing on frozen lakes and ice fishing contests and Norhtern Lights and all the twinkly crunchy crackly brilliance of this barbaric climate we call home. Brrrrrr!  See you today at the King Boreas Grand Day Parade, 2 p.m.!

More acronyms.  You would think when we flung the BT Swedes and their endless ABA jargon about kids with ASDs and how to approach little TBS there would be a little less BS.  Not true, BTW. 

Today I met with the provider of Toe’s (and our family’s) newest service: Personal Care Attendance.   Forget what you may have heard or experienced with the PCA acronym.  These folks don’t just clean out trach tubes and make low-mobility elder folks their lunch.  These are some experienced, peppy, child-development experts who basically provide us with 30 hrs.per week of help with anything we may need as a family with an autistic child. And it is covered by insurance (LORD, have a thanked you yet today for American health insurance?  Please, LORD, help Pres. BHO get it going for all the folks!).  This means Tovi will have a para who can take him on a community outing, say to the Science Museum, so that I can have one-on-one time to spend with Reuben and his needs.  Or the para can implement the ABA therapy plan I write up for them while I am doing the laundry, reading to Reuben, having surgery, or what have you.  They can also accompany us as a family on outings to be there just for Toe.  Say, for example, this happens:  we are all out to dinner and Toe needs to run to the restroom to toss his cookies because he is so disgusted by Roo diving into a big juicy bowl of pasta with red sauce—PCA can go with Toe, allowing us to stay with Roo, finish our meal, keep our own cookies down (the aforementioned is based on a true story—the names have not been changed so you will know it is about us and how zany our life is).  It’s essentially an extra set of hands to the fire.

Oh, and if we can occasionally get a sitter for just Roo (a much easier prospect than trying to get a sitter for two live wires) on an evening while the para is with Toe, then maybe we can get our errands run or have a date night for the first time since about 2006.  And just maybe our whole world every minute of every day will not be wrapped around continual endless relentless teaching and child-rearing.  Sounds good, what do you think? OMG, I can’t wait.  Next week they are sending us PCAs for “meet and greets” so we can choose folks who are just right for Toe and the family, and then we are off to the races!

Happy 2nd Birthday, little Nor'easter!  You are pracitically a grown-up lady!  Love from the B-S'ers to you (and your Mommy and Daddy Bobbys)!

Toe’s got a pre-K best buddy named Jimmy.  Best friends at five are the coolest thing.  Toe and Jimmy hug, they plot together at school to rule certain areas of the classroom arena, they laugh at each other’s silly faces and bring in their latest favorite toys for each other to ogle.  After dinner Toe asks to call Jimmy.  Maybe he wants to know what J-man had to eat, or what he’ll be reading at story time with his mom that night.  I don’t know.  I don’t ask.  It’s a privacy thing.

When I was five my best kindergarten friend was Kathy B. (one of four Kathys in my class).  One day my youngest bro, Patrick,  had to stay home from school with a bad flu, and when I told my 21 year-old big sister (our babysitter) I was sick too, she p’shawed me and sent me off to school anyway.  She probably figured I was lying in order to stay home and camp out in my parents’ big bed with Patrick, sip 7-up and watch cartoons too.  That would have been a good and crafty idea if, say, kids of five had the ability for evil and cunning.  At any rate, when it was my turn at school to pick someone for Kitty Wants a Chair, I stood up in the middle of the circle, pointed to Kathy B., and projectile vomited on her.  Kathy wasn’t my best friend after that.  Whenever she met my eyes she darted away sheepishly like someone who owes you money.

In first grade I was a little fickle, preferring not to put all my eggs in one best-friend basket.  There was Angie Lemon whose mom let her wear long red Lee press-on nails to school, Lovette (yes, Lovette) who cried all the time, Ginger and Penny who liked playing with clay as much as I did (common interests).  Nobody really grabbed my heart, though, not until second grade when I equally adored both Heather—a hard-edged city girl who lived across the street from the school with her single-parent mom  and grandma, and talked like a forty year-old—and Danny B., a soft-spoken tow-haired boy who had the most beautiful penmanship, could do Abbott and Costello bits with his buddy Terry from memory, and who was the only one in class who ever got higher grades than I did.  Of course, having boy best friends is verboten in the grade school racket, so Heather it was.

First best friends are so formative for young psyches.  Heather, whom I believe to be the first (or at least one of the first) Heathers ever, introduced me to many things.  Hooliganism, for one.  Heather wasn’t a hooligan herself, per se, but she had access to hooligans, particularly her boy cousin who was often hanging about, getting into all sorts of neighborhood mischief.  Being the child of strict and watchful traditional parents, I was rarely left alone, and hooliganism just didn’t have a chance to bud and flourish in that environment.  Most of the kids in my neighborhood and all the kids in my family were in similar situations, so we had to settle for behaving ourselves mostly and admiring hooligans and other outlaws types from afar.

Also, Heather was the only single-parent friend I had, and the only person I ever met whose grandma was young, told Polish jokes and smoked.  Practically every city mom smoked in 1976 (and drank cocktails, typically--I think they may have been celebrating the Bicentennial or something), but nobody’s grandma did (oh, and by 1980, the urban mom party was over—all the moms seemed to have stopped smoking and drinking and were now wearing stylish track suits with matching Keds, making hook rugs, eating “AIDs “—a brand name back then--diet candies and getting professional body waves).  Typical grandmas in the MN 1970s lived rurally, had huge gardens and root cellars and went to one-room school houses during the Depression.  Heather’s grandma was younger than my mom and swore.  She had a job in an office and yelled advice at Heather’s mom while smoking in the kitchen and changing her pantyhose.  It was a new definition of family to me.

Heather was funny and adventruous and smart.  She got A's without ever studying, read thick grown-up books like A Clockwork Orange and Flowers in the Attic and passed them around, and always had something planned for us we'd never done before. Her slumber parties were legendary, involving candlelit seances and late-night squirting of mustard on car door handles, but also more tame activities like hair-stying, cookie-baking and dancing to folk music playing on her portable turntable in the basement.  We were very different, but admired each other as oddities.  By high school we were friendly but from our own ends of reality.  Heather was class president and voted best dressed.  I was voted most intelligent and busy with Math Team and Mock Trial.  We went our ways, a little more open-minded than before we had each other, I like to think.

I don’t know what will become of Toe and Jimmy.  For now, they are just a beautiful little microcosm or God’s great institution of friendship.  Maybe they will forget all about each other in a month, or maybe 34 years from now they will be FaceBook friends, keeping up on each other’s cool new toys and remembering that bond of firsts.

Last night I was visited by pain.  After following me around like a shadow all day, it pursued me into my REM time.  I dreamed one of Roo’s tiny toy velociraptors was chewing on my left leg like a Renaissance Fair turkey drummie, and that I was fleeing from the beast over a bed of freshly molten volcanic magma, glowing with heat and vexingly sticky.  Imagine the worst burn you’ve ever had, then add the prickly heat of severe poison ivy and the sensation of having a wee needle jabbing the soft underside of your eyelid.  Then imagine that sensation covering the entire bottom of both feet.  That’s it.  Now imagine sleep.

Pain has a scale .  You’ve probably seen it tacked up in you MD’s exam room, like an idiot’s guide to the emotional spectrum.  Level 1 is your average happy face.  By level 3 the smiley appears to be perspiring, but trying to hide it.  As you progress up the scale, the expression grows increasingly and unabashedly grim and contorted, until finally a sobbing level 10 looks out at you with a brow so wrinkly and furrowed he resembles a coon hound, or an aged Marlon Brando weeping blood.  The names for pain scales pretty much evince what they teach:  The Face Arms Legs Cry Consolability Scale, The Schmidt Sting Pain Index, and the exotic Dolorimeter Pain Scale.  If you are looking hard at one of these bad boys, chances are you are in trouble already.

With a few quarterly exceptions, number 8 is about as high as I go.  It is a cave I often visit, therefore most familiar to me.  Level 8 pain is simply best described with a line from scripture: I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine (Job 7:15).  In the company of 8, I long for death, but of course it does not come.  Then I get up the next morning and make a pot of coffee, tumble with my lads, sweep the floor.  Ole #8 is terrifying, but survivable.  Level 9--where I have been (shudder)--means passing into a haze where one must grit ones teeth and focus singularly on separating oneself mentally from the body.  At level 10, where most people who do not live in chronic pain would be rushing themselves to the ER, I am typically a motionless and solitary being, clutching a bottle of Vicodin in a darkened room and whispering breathlessly, over and over again, if only to comfort myself with the possibility of rescue, “911…911…911.”

Then, before you know I am back at my baseline, jolly #4, living life, warding off the return of 8 with lad-love, a stick and a prayer.

Happy birthday to our biggest little weirdo, Toe, born five years ago on the coldest day of the 2005 winter, arriving almost rudely early as pensive and overly-anxious Brauns will do.  Our firstborn, fruit of my womb, end of the insouciant and wrinkle-free me.

In our house, birthday is good all week.  This is adapted from the draconian one-day, one-cake, one-gift birthdays of our severe and evil parents, and modernized to fit the current “more is more” cultural model of present day.  Okay, I am exaggerating.  Our parents only seemed evil and severe, and birthday bonanzas around here pale—they wither really—in comparison to what most conspicuously-consuming Generation X  (yes, I missed the Baby Busters by 4 years and am squarely young enough to be an X) parents of our cohort are doing for their greedy boomlet Generation Z  offspring.

Pooh.  Even my strict and budgetwise Depression-survivor Dad would take me to buy a kitten on Saturday (claiming it would be my only gift and I’d better be sure), then come home from work on Tuesday with a huge sketch pad and markers—maybe a snazzy little spongy polyester Garanimals pantsuit too—on my seventh birthday.  And my Mom always, always took me for a dress-up luncheon with kiddie cocktails at the downtown Dayton’s River Room.  She even let me carry her stylish spring linen and gold clutch for her, and eat the olives from her martini(s).  Okay, times have changed some.

So, Hubby and I have a tradition of pre-birthday birthday cake breakfast.  Toe just likes to dance around the dark kitchen in the pre-dawn and blow out the candles anyway, then asks for Ritz crackers and dried cherries and retires back to bed to watch Max and Ruby. So it’s more for the festivity.  Roo stays behind at the table to suck all the candles clean, then use them as filet knives to skin the cake of its icing.  Hubby and Birdie enjoy a slab of cake over the aroma of hot coffee, and really, is it all that different than a giant donut?

Birthday week also inevitably involves a lot of singing.  We do that anyway around here, but instead of twirling through the dining room crooning Put On Your Sunday Clothes , all lyrics of life are set to the tune of either Happy Birthday or For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow or Hoch Soll Sie Leben! Yes, birthday week has a continental flair.  After all, there is a world outside of Yonkers, Barnaby.

What else you will find during birthday week: favorite meals, phone calls to faraway favorite tios and tantes, character cupcakes and living room picnics, treat bags and paper crowns, sparkly badges of honor and a pre-K classroom birthday blowout with Miss Claire and the Wheelock School party patrol.

What you won’t see during a BlueCollar birthday:  ponies, traveling backyard petting zoos, diamond-encrusted party invitations with a hand-cut shadowbox sillouette of the birthday child tastefully framed in gold brocade, $100 Build-A-Bear adventure package party favors, A Piece of Cake cake (although, YUM, so never say never), clowns, jugglers, magicians, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters or any other child-focused entertainer who may or may not be a level 3 offender.

But, on celebration of the fives, we do go great guns and bring out the bouncy house!  So, sue me.