Party Central

We've had two straight days of partying here at Chez Reed between Mothers Day and Alison's birthday, most of it overseen by Godzilla.

The inflatable monster was actually a wedding gift Jeff and I got from Eric and Tracy Yocum, who I think were cleaning their garage when they said, hey, let's add this to the pile! (They gave us an incredibly generous "real" gift, as well.) We use the All Clad more often than we let Godzilla out, but Ali loves the silly thing. She found it once in its original box downstairs and I think he's come out at every birthday since.

She likes to position it at the front door to greet people.

The poor thing has a slow leak, so sometime before she went to bed, Ali put the couch cushions under its head as it wilted on the living room floor.

So we've been serving up nothing but straight fun for 5 days now. Alison's birthday was Thursday but Jeff had to work so we had her dinner on Wednesday; she opened her family gifts Thursday morning followed up by her annual "It's-my-birthday-have-a-doughnut!" extravaganza. She shares with her class and some extra teachers and friends. Most kids bring in cookies or cupcakes but she doesn't like them. So she brings in yeast doughnuts. This year, we expanded into half of them being chocolate iced because so many of her friends like chocolate.

So we get the sugar to school and I go off to work. She and I laid around like dogs that night, resting up for a Friday sleepover with her friend Amanda and then her party at Laser Flash Saturday. It turned out that a handful of her party friends came over after, (some came early) and Amanda slept over again. I tried really hard to resist the Dairy Queen blizzard cake, but failed miserably. There's still half of it in the freezer downstairs next to my Costco box full of Skinny Cow ice cream. There's a reason "skinny" is not part of the Dairy Queen brand.

I'm not sure how I'm going to trick my taste buds into liking the Skinny Cow stuff again. But that cake has got to get out of my house.

Sunday brought Mothers Day and another pile of presents, including the new Sookie Stackhouse book, high-class coffee and an iPad.

Jeff had agreed to spend part of his Tuesday (Election Day)off work finishing up Alison's birthday shopping. Instead, he called me at work to tell me he's messed up our computer network at home and needed all my passwords again to fix it. He said he'd been trying to fix the thing for hours. I don't remember if I relayed my frustration to him, but I hope I kept it to myself.

Because, as it turns out, he was lying his butt off and calling me from the Apple store where he was loading up the iPad. Our plan is to give Ali the laptop, which she steals every chance she gets. But we can't do that until I figure out how to get my photos from the camera to the iPad.

What do you think I'll read first -- Sookie or the iPad book?