Eight Is Too Much

Caroline's party started out innocent enough. 

How is it that every 'small' party ends up bigger and bigger by the time the party day rolls around?  Her original party of five jumped to a party of eight, which doubled (well, not literally) the fun....and tripled the chaos.  It's okay, birthdays only come around once a year. 

Thank goodness. 

I'm not sure if I could handle more than one of these shin digs a year, which then makes me feel like a total wuss because moms of more than one do have to deal with such things.  And then  I think about my sister in law who is pregnant with baby number eight.  Caroline's one night slumber party is my sister in law's every day reality.  I probably shouldn't complain, should I?

Anyway, as all good parties should, ours started off with a table full of food.

Fruit + skewers to make kabobs.

and drink umbrellas for the unpictured fruit smoothies.

Come to think of it, a lot of what happened during the party went unpictured.  It's hard to serve food, clean up messes, control (or at least try to control) the masses AND take pictures at the same time.

Before we ate make-it-yourself pizzas and stabbed fruit with wooden pokers, the girls painted their initial letters.

and then they painted each other.

Food was eaten, messes were made, kiwi ended up on the bottom of two of the girls feet and then some loud and obnoxious games were played.  One involved a dark basement, flashlights and blood curdling screams; the other was 'beach themed' pictionary.  Oh, and a scavanger hunt, with clues put together by Caroline and Bailey, to find the hidden coconut. 

And then there were presents.

and cake! 

Caroline doesn't like to be sung to.

And this is where the pictures really stop because by the end of cake time, I was nearing the point where I felt like crawling in a sound proof hole.

But before I could actually lose it, we made paper flowers.   And I swept up little tissue paper pieces.  Twice.  Because we started upstairs and somehow the floral party moved downstairs at one point.

And then there was Just Dance 2 on the Wii and some DVRd Disney Channel shows.  Oh, and then we noticed the drippy ceiling.  The girls had hot chocolate and popcorn while I tried to find the source of the water drips and emailed our landlord.

By 11, I begged the girls to quiet down, but they didn't. 

They had a pillow fight instead. 

At 11:20 they started to color and I crawled up to my bedroom, exhausted, defeated and praying I wouldn't wake up to a flood in my basement.

The girls finally fell asleep around midnight; I followed soon after.  We all woke early, ready to eat a nutritious breakfast of doughnuts.  Shouldn't every birthday slumber party end with doughnuts in the morning?  Except, one poor party guest woke with a headache and a low grade fever; her mom came to get her, leaving her twin sister here to eat the doughnuts I snuck out to get from Dunkin Donuts. 

Like I said earlier, Craig wasn't here for the party because he was visiting his friend who lives 70 miles away.  It was all okay, except I did place one stipulation on the whole situation:  Craig HAD TO be home by 8:30 am with doughnuts.  Otherwise, he'd be subjected to the wrath of one very unhappy girl.  That would be me, not Caroline. 

Gladly, Craig came home earlier than expected, but without the doughnuts, which was actually okay because he was home by 7.  I was really quite happy to escape to pick them up myself.  A few moments of silence, the intoxicating smell of the inside of a Dunkin Donuts and a large coffee were calling my name. 

All in all, the girls had a good time.  That's all that matters, right?

But next year? 

Next year, I'm not throwing a party  I'll remember that eight is most definitely too much.