Party season has begun

As most of you know, party season starts around here in October with The First Birthday and ends in January with The Last Birthday. With St. Nicholas, Christmas, and one more birthday squeezed in between. This year we started one day early because the bowling alley doesn't do parties on Thursdays so it was either Wednesday or Friday.

So today was the Kid Party with the pals from school and tomorrow is the real birthday.

It was fun. When you sign up for a bowling party you think that an hour of bowling* is not very long. But in fact when it is Disco Magic Bowling, wherein the room is darkish and strobe lights and flicker lights and mirrored balls in the ceiling and black lights and glowing flourescent colored bowling pins and bowling balls give the only illumination; when some kind of smoke pours down from the ceiling every now and again (in time to the music no less) and there are animated dancing things on the screens which in the olden days only showed the actual game score, well, then an hour is about as much as they can handle.+

It's more than the fours can handle actually, we had our two four year olds and one of the young fives in tears at least once each for no reason other than the top blowing off their personal central nervous systems. Though each of them went right back to bowling after being gently removed to a quieter venue and petted for a few minutes.

Douwe demanded a "Mars Cake" for his birthday. A "Mars Cake" has nothing to do with the planet. A Mars Cake it turns out is a cake which is just like a Mars Bar. An American Mars cake no less. Well, he did not demand it; he requested it. Firmly. So I said that there was no such thing. He said there certainly was: you make a chocolate cake, then you put the white fluffy stuff on the bottom, caramel on top of that, then you put chocolate all over it and that's a Mars Cake. He then cut a Mars Bar in half with a knife to demonstrate the layers. (Like I have never seen a Mars Bar). Oh, and it has to be a rectangle.

Let no one say I do not play requests. One package of Duncan Hines Chocolate cake mix, one jar of Marshmallow Fluff**, one bag of caramels later, here is a Mars Cake:



Okay, and some whipped cream. It isn't a cake in Holland without whipped cream. It's a dairy country, they don't do frosting.

I was assured that no self respecting Dutch child would ever eat such a thing, which was greeted with horrible shudders all round by the rest of my family. So I also made the same cake I have made for Douwe every year since we got here, which is really a cheesecake but they call it something else:
















We invited eight kids and six came, which is pretty good for us. Since The First Birthday falls in a vacation period, we always lose a couple to travel and other vacation plans.

We had only one girl, who was in fact the first child I met at the Montessori School. She walked up to me and announced that she was going to marry my son. Quite seriously. So I congratulated her on her taste and said I was pleased to meet her. (Well, what was I supposed to say?) She went on to say that I should keep this nugget to myself as she had not told the groom yet. Oh, I said, well, you should probably mention it at some point. She said, "Oh, yes, but he can be so difficult, so I will tell him at the very last moment. Then he'll just go along".

Since I regularly use the same technique on him, I could find nothing to quarrel with about this and promised to say nothing and asked her what color dress I should wear. "oh, what you like" she said. "They will all be looking at me anyway".

Gotta like that kid. The boys were mostly the usual suspects, with a few new additions since the start of the new school year.






And after much bowling we moved on to the rest of the bacchanalia:






No of course that beer is not his. It wasn't that kind of party.

And may I just add that the horrible American Cake was entirely demolished, destroyed, right down to its last Fluffer Nutter soaked crumb. So There.

Well, okay, there are a couple pieces left, otherwise I would be baking another one right now. For the Second Installment tomorrow.

Stay tuned.


*followed by food, some kind of horrible punch thingie which the kids suck down as though they had recently been crawling on all fours across a desert, cake, ice cream, and then candy on top of that -- ooh, my kids' friends' parents are lovin' me right about now, as their offspring race around making crop circles in the carpet, screaming incoherently from the sugar rush. Like, say, this



Or maybe an impromptu conga line in the living room:















+ I know, in the real Olden Days they kept score on paper. With a pencil. Probably a grease pencil, the kind you pulled the string and unravelled it in strips. But I am not old enough to remember those.


** Real American! it says on the label. I never saw a jar of marshmallow fluff in my life before moving here but there you are.