Bella's Book Party

Here's the thing: I have a lot of opinions about kid's birthday parties.

I don't do characters.

I won't send kids home with a bunch of crappy trinkets their parents either have to find a place for or surreptitiously throw away.

I also won't send them home with tons of candy they will relentlessly beg their parents for.

I don't want a dozen kids bringing a dozen presents for my birthday child on top of everything they've already received from us, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends.

I don't think you need to spend a ton of money for kid's parties, and I still think simple is best.

Handmade is best.

Creativity is best.

I want them to reflect genuine values or interests that we have.

 So that said, here is the party I put together for Bella. I am fortunate that she is tractable and still trusts all my ideas. I just pitch my idea with excitement, and she's on board. 

And thus, the book party was born.

 Invitations:

I bought a few children's books at Goodwill for buy one, get one free and ended up using them for many things for the party. First, I cut and then sewed them into simple flap envelopes for the invitations. For fun and interest I mixed and matched the front and backs of the envelopes from different books.

The actual invitations were downloaded and printed from Family Fun here .

 Decor:

I relied mostly on books and other props we already owned for  the decor, and used pages from the books I bought at Goodwill to make several banners with some bias tape.

(Doll I made and an elephant Michelle made for Bella's birthday)

I just piled books onto a plate rack in my kitchen and then strung it with a mini book page banner I made with some thin double-fold bias tape.

I made this banner from inspiration here.

I love the way it twirls and spins all the time. It's like art in motion.

Above the window I made a 'Happy Birthday Bella' banner with a scrabble font, with a large book page pennant banner beneath that.

And under that, a book page wreath from this tutorial.

Warning: It took forever to make. And it's still not done. I had to stop because of time constraints and I ran out of hot glue. This was by far the most time consuming part of the party preparation.

Activities:

I set up the table with some activities to keep the kids occupied while we waited for everyone to arrive. It generally takes about 20 minutes for everyone to arrive and I can't stand having a dozen kids run helter skelter all over my bitty house. I put out a bowl of scrabble tiles for the dual purpose of cuteness and manipulatives for the kids, and was surprised how much they played with them, spelling words.

I printed out kindergarten-level word searches (a favorite of Bella's) and some Dr. Suess coloring pages to keep them busy. They loved them!

 

After everyone arrived, I split the kids into 2 groups. One group stayed at the table and made bookmarks, all with craft supplies I had on hand: markers, foam stickers, scrapbook paper, paper flowers, ribbon, and rubber stamps and ink.

Meanwhile, I helped the other group with a 'Book Treasure Hunt' I made up. 

I started by exclaiming that books were all treasures- of knowledge, imagination, adventure, and experiences and that we were going to find some of the treasures in these stories.

I made up 10 different clues that I glued in the back of each book. For instance, the first clue was "This friend should not be about while your mother is out!" (The Cat in the Hat) I gave them the first one, so the next clue was in the back of The Cat in the Hat and they had to work together to figure out all 10 books in order. Sometimes they could guess from the title, sometimes someone had read the book, and sometimes I had to nudge them in the right direction.

It was definitely most fun for the kids who were proficient and liked reading. (Bella loved it.)

I made these nerdy treasure maps to try and reinforce my somewhat contrived idea. At each number they wrote in the name of the book for that clue.

Their 'treasure' at the end was their favor bags. (More on those later-)

The third activity was probably their favorite.We played a book version of a cake walk. I scanned and printed full page book covers of some of our favorite books. I also printed smaller versions, like these fit on a sheet of paper. I laminated the full-size sheets and used them for the spots for the kids to stop on.  I used the smaller ones folded in a paper bag as the 'call books'. (They moved around the books to They Might Be Giants album, 'No'.)

The best part was when their book was called, they each got to pick out a book to open. On the invitation, I asked the parents to bring a wrapped book for a book exchange in lieu of a gift. They were so excited to pick out a book and that everyone had a gift to open at the party. I was thankful for meaningful gifts for each of the kids and that Bella wasn't left with a pile of cheap toys she doesn't need.

Food:

Once again, I kept it simple. I love when I see huge dessert buffets at parties on blogs, and I love dreaming of various treats to make and how to arrange and display them. However, I don't want to spend a ton of money and more importantly, I don't want to feed the kids 50 kinds of sugar.

Small water bottles, covered in old book paper.

I ended up making cupcakes and a cake because I wanted to make sure we had enough. There were 13 kids and I wanted leftovers of my favorite cake in the world.

For the cupcakes I used the thumbnail versions of the book covers we scanned and used them for cupcake toppers.

Favors:

I cut off the bottom of a paper bag and sent it through my printer to put my quote on it. Then I zigzag stitched the bottom closed, and after filling it with goodies, stitched the top closed.

I bought some Dr. Seuss pencils on Amazon, printed some bookplates from here and made some bags of 'Book Worms'. (Just enough of a treat that they won't be begging for it for days on end, and bookplates and pencils that they can actually use. Plus a new book!)

And the grand total for the whole party was $53.37 total. Not too bad!

Best of all, Bella had a great time with her friends. I gotta say, it's a whole lot of work for an hour and a half party! It made me think, what have I started? I've done a party like this for the last 4 years, but I don't think I can do one every year for both of my girls! Not that I have any shortage of ideas though...I already have 3 or 4 ideas I'm batting around for next year.

34/100

Totally lifted this from Jill and Shell, but I too love a good list and I was very curious to see how many I'd read. I agree that the list is a little strange and i don't value it as a comprehensive list of books every adult should read. I think a few of these books are... interesting picks for a top 100 list. That said, I am sadly lacking in the tally of classics I have read. I want to read them, but get more tempted and lured by the latest book Shell or Hannah or whoever has read, so I read that instead. There being a never- ending list of books I want to read, it seems I never get around to these classics...My goal this year was to read 50 books, and I think I'm on about 40 or so for the year so far. Maybe my next reading goal will be to tackle the classics.

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

So I've read more than the average adult (I should hope so- 6?! that's appalling.) But not as many as I would like.

Here’s what you are supposed to do:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE. Share this list in your blog, too, if you like. (I skipped this step.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

'Learned Optimism.'

Ever since my last post I've been mentally tallying a list of things I want to write about, but have been consumed with formatting my first Blog Book! I have almost finished formatting my first year's blog with Blurb, and will just wait a little while until I can afford to publish it. For anyone who has already done this, what company or site did you use? And for anyone who wants to do this and hasn't, I recommend starting now because it is quite time-consuming, and I have much less to do than many of you! At least I just have my files saved and I can tweak it or publish it at will. At least it's ready.
So what's on my mind right now? This book I started reading last night, 'Learned Optimism'. I frequently read self-help books in an effort to better understand and manage my depression. I don't know how much difference it makes since it's an on-going struggle, but I would say that I've made progress. I think I spend most of my time not depressed, with fewer and shorter 'sodes, and that hasn't always been the case. This book sounded interesting as I would love to be an optimist. I have never thought of myself as a pessimist, really. (Some of you may be snickering-) But truly, I think of myself as realistic, and only given to pessimism when I am depressed. Obviously I can make improvement towards being more of an optimist or I wouldn't be reading this book. Well not too far into the book, I came across the inevitable quiz to determine your degree of pessimism. After all, the author asserts that far more people are pessimists than they realize or would admit. I think it is a very interesting quiz, and not as obvious as so many are. Most of the time I take any sort of personality-revealing quiz I cannot help but try and analyze what I think I am admitting to in my answers. I try to remain unbiased, but I can generally tell which answers are right, and that makes it hard to answer objectively. This quiz was different. It is based on several different criteria, or categories, and if taken with care and thought is very interesting and revealing! I found it online and linked it above if you want to take it- I suggest you do. If you are going to, ignore the next portion of this post until you have taken and scored your own test.
Here were my surprising (to me) results:
The first category is what is called Permanence, or how long you believe certain events will last.
There is Permanent Bad for how you view the bad events that occur. My score was 6, or equal to what is 'quite pessimistic.'
There is also Permanent Good, which measures the same belief only with good things. My score here was 3, or equal to 'moderately pessimistic.'
Next is Pervasiveness- whether you can compartmentalize a problem, or whether it 'bleeds' over into everything. 'It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area.' That describes me to a 't'! My score for Pervasive Bad was 6, or 'moderately pessimistic.' For Pervasive Good, a 2- 'very pessimistic'.
Next is a gauge for your level of Hope. Another statement that describes me perfectly: 'Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair...People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations... No other single score is as important as your hope score.'
My score: 12, or 'severely hopeless.' Okay.
Personalization: whether you internalize or externalize the causes of good and bad events around you. It is a good indicator of your self-esteem: an optimist would externalize bad events and internalize good ones. So my scores: Personalization Bad- 7, or 'indicates very low self-esteem.' Personalization Good- 3, 'moderately pessimistic.'
Next you use those numbers to calculate your totals of Bad (your views and responses to bad events) and Good(likewise with good events). Bad- 18. 'Anything above 14 cries out for change'. My Good-8, or 'indicates great pessimism.'
Finally, you subtract your Bad score from the Good, and I got -10. It says 'a score of 0 or below is very pessimistic.' I got -10, people. Apparently I am in the lowest scores across the board-in every aspect of pessimism. (and thusly, depression, one can extrapolate.)
Luckily I was laughing out loud throughout the scoring of this quiz, especially at my final score. (That's optimistic, right?) I was really surprised. Even though I wouldn't have previously described myself as a pessimist, I could admit to some pessimism- otherwise I wouldn't fall prey to depression so easily. But I'm really bad off! Stupidly, my first thought was 'Wow, I'm a hopeless pessimist'! Then I immediately realized the redundancy and ridiculousness of that statement.
Something to think about. I'm anxious to read on since I'm only on page 53. I'm sure I will post more revelatory and insightful information from this book as I go on. I am feeling hopeful (despite my hopeless scores) because according to the title of the book, optimism can be learned and I am an anxious pupil!
If you took the test, how did you do?
The Book is 'Learned Optimism' by Martin Seligman.

Ridiculousness.

This nonsense has got to stop. When she was a baby, it started out with just a couple of stuffed animals of my choosing, and her favorite blanket. (And of course the requisite binkie.) Somehow, by small indulgences I am sure, we have arrived at this state. She hasn't taken a nap for 3 out of the last 4 days which is highly unusual, and last night we had a first: she woke me up screaming at 2:30 am for some
unintelligible item that was obviously of most importance. To her. I went in, which I usually avoid, so that we could all return to a state of slumber. Especially since tt's alarm was due to go off in just 2 1/2 hours. I finally identified that necessary item as 'Blue Page' a torn-out page from one of her Sandra Boynton books. I retrieved it, but the wailing requests kept coming. 'Blue Spatula!!!!' (a common refrain). Gave her the spatula. 'Brown book!!!' ( I never did figure that one out...) 'Wocket!!!!' (...in my Pocket. Suess. Delivered.) What can I say,? I was tired and groggy. I just wanted the crying to stop! By the time she told me she wanted all of the books, which is roughly 25 more, I drew the line. I left her and went back to bed. She cried for about 5 more minutes and mercifully drifted back to sleep. But not before she had acquired the following assortment of crap in her crib:
* 13 books
* 2 blankets
* 1 binkie
* 4 shoes
* 3 plastic dogs
* 1 Dora figure
* 2 babies
* 6 stuffed animals
* 1 tube of ointment
* 1 blue spatula
* 1 'Blue Page'
* 1 baby bead toy
Other common requests are 2 blue spatulas, various books by the names she has given them and I have to decipher, dish towels, candles, clementines, cereal, any and every toy... Basically any random item in the house that she wants to confiscate for her personal use. This is insane. No wonder she can't sleep. Presently, there are 4 stuffed animals, 1 binkie, and her blanket in her crib. We'll see how she reacts to that when 'nap time' comes in about half an hour. Argh.

Literature

It is midnight, and Timm has been asleep for nigh unto three hours, while I lie beside him, reading. Such is our pattern of late. Tonight when I finally forced myself to put the book down I was left with thoughts tumbling through my mind of literature and the love I feel for it. I have always met those who claim they do not like to read with a guarded skepticism and even some pity. It is a good thing that most of the treasured people in my life enjoy books.

Right now I am reading Michelle's copy of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. It is one of Shell's favorites, and we have a nearly identical taste for books, as well as a matched need and reverence for them. I do not know why I have never read it until now, especially considering my affinity for contemporary American Literature.
This said, I could not stop pondering how I love to read...Everything. Some books are fun, a lighthearted distraction, a look into another's life, a different time and culture. Some are merely am acceptable form of escape, leaving me momentarily placated, but not necessarily changed. This is not one of those books.
This is one of those books that while reading I am so consumed by it, not only because of the thoroughly flushed out characters that you have a conflicted concern for- even somewhat of a mirrored representation, but also because the pure music of his prose leaves you wanting. After relinquishing the book, strings of words still flit through my mind, trying to piece together a semblance of that beauty to describe what I read, what I feel. It also leaves me wanting. But I enjoy the exercise. I do so love words.
What came to mind is this analogy... Reading Stegner, and more specifically, Angle of Repose, I feel a voracious need to consume the language. I wish I could be more poised like Jill and take a more conscious note of what I am reading, while I am reading it. I wish that I stopped to make notes, or at least underline, or scribble a page number, but I do not. I read, hurriedly along, devouring words and paragraphs and pages like succulent fruit, that I then read and reread again to catch the drops that have fallen on my lips in my haste.
Such is the delight and ease I find while reading tonight. It may not sound like ease, but even in that ravenousness, I am more at peace than any other activity could bless me with.
I hope to make a more thorough assessment of the novel later- indeed, Pulitzer Prize winning novel- but for now, I have one simple excerpt that made me smile. Keep in mind, this is a departure from the writing in most of the book. It is not a very good view of the writing or subject matter as a whole, nonetheless, I am smiling at the music of his prose.

"It happens that I despise that locution 'having sex', which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than f*cking."
hee.

Perhaps this gem is more representative of the general tone:

"What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them."

Pick it up.