It'll take a year to recover.

We did it! We survived Dutch's party! 

Cook honored the festive occasion by dressing up. The tie, FYI, has his clan plaid on it.

It was fun. It was, however, faster-moving than I'd expected, so I didn't get as many pictures as I'd have liked. The main activity was a scavenger hunt involving invisible ink pens (when Dutch and I were shopping for party favors, she saw those pens, and she Had To Have Them) and clues written in invisible ink on "old" paper (aged by Cook, using coffee grounds and the oven) and then cut into five pieces.  

The idea was that the kids had to put the pieces together like a puzzle and read the clues using the magic lights in the caps of their pens. In practice, it was a lot more chaotic than that.

Dutch and Best Friend (remember her? Still invited to birthday parties after going to separate schools for a whole year) were by far the most engaged of all the kids in actually puzzling things out.

They had to get the shovel out of the shed so they could dig up the treasure...

Regrettably, I have no photos of them discovering the X that Cook had made over the treasure spot, or of them digging it up. There was a lot of yelling, squealing, jumping up and down, and flailing of shovels. They were then fairly disappointed to discover that all they got was a package containing five Mad Libs books. (Another thing Dutch discovered at the toy store and Had To Have.) They recovered, however, and the conversation over lunch went sort of like this (really, really loudly):
"Can I have another piece of pizza?"
"Can you give me a noun?"
"I need an adjective!"

It was tiring. Even though it pretty very low-key by kid birthday standards,* there was a fair amount of food and activity prep required. There was some weird kid chemistry. Several of the kids refused to eat any of the food, including the ridiculously sugary and buttery cupcakes I served up. One of the kids threw a fit because we have bar soap instead of liquid soap. There was a bit of a fracas over whose gift would get opened first.**  Skipper was tired and grumpy and insisted on being carried the entire time (except when she ate all the frosting off a cupcake). We were all so worn-out afterward that we just ate leftover pizza and cupcakes for dinner while watching TV, and put the kids to bed early.



* No balloons. No decorations. No bouncy house. Home-made food. Boring.
**Gift-giving and parties - it's a disaster. We've tried to do no-gift parties, or hand-me-downs-or-home-made-only gift parties, or open-presents-after-the-party parties, and this year we just gave up. Now they're old enough that they actually WANT to see the birthday kid open the present they brought. And I guess it's worthwhile to practice giving and receiving gifts. Dutch and I talked a lot about her responsibility as hostess and as the receiver of gifts. Luckily, she didn't have to suppress any disappointment in her gifts, because she loved them all.