party planning

It is a fine evening. A soft, though not cool, breeze is blowing and the sun is at that stage of warm evening glow. Calvin is in bed. He is reading about bats and The Wizard of Oz as he tries to find sleep. The past week has brought unseasonably hot days and drought-like weather—a slight shock in the wake of so much rain—and between the heat of the days, and the late setting sun at night, there has been less sleep and more grouching around here. It doesn't help that our neighbors put their young children to bed after ten at night, and they all play noisily outside until then. A part of me would love to live by the sun, to go to bed when it gets dark and rise when it's light, but that's not enough sleep for Calvin, as I'm finding lately. That's not to say that we always mandate an early bedtime. I love that the flexibility of this life allows us to stay up late when the night calls us by name (or promises s'mores).

We are gearing up over here for a fifth birthday celebration. Calvin turns five on Thursday. We will celebrate on that day just the three of us (just the two during the day, in fact), and on Saturday we will have his grandparents and some other family over for dinner. He is planning the party himself—a Wizard of Oz spectacular. He has a mulititude of plans, some of which will be possible, others that are pretty pie-in-the-sky. I love that he is helping plan, I love that he is excited about the event, and I love even more that he is perfectly pleased to keep it as the small affair we've had every year since his first (small affair, of course, referring to the number of guests, not to the extravagance of the celebration he is actively planning).

Do you know how hard it is to find Wizard of Oz accoutrements that are not based on the movie? They are, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. Which is probably best, since that will keep everything homegrown. I will be playing with fondant for the first time ever this week.

Saturday on vacation

Into every vacation a little rain must fall. If it weren't for the rain we wouldn't discover things such as local museums. Visiting Holland for the tulips and the beaches is one thing, and we often hit their tourist places, like Windmill Island or Dutch Village, but we this was the first year we visited their little local museum. It was definitely little, with a rather eclectic collection that ranged from local history to bizarre Native American or even Mexican artifacts, but every museum is worth a good look. No photography allowed, of course, but we got to see Dutch impressionism by rather obscure artists, a collection of "after hours work" by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, and Calvin reading the information plaques all by himself (which alone was worth the trip).

And afterwards, rather inadvertently (like the rest of the trip, really) we stumbled onto the Tulip Time parade and its multitude of festival queens and courts—the Tulip Queen, the Maple Syrup Queen, the Red Flannel Queen, the Asparagus Queen, the Apple Queen. I had no idea there were so many eligible teens in Holland. Calvin adored the bands. And any Dutch dancers he happened to espy. And we stopped by New Holland for beers and snacks while we waited for traffic to clear after the festivities ended, because this was probably the one day in all the year that traffic crawls to a stop in this little town.