My busy week culminated last night after my son’s fourth birthday yesterday. I’ve got this whole week off to recover.
On Friday I had about eight children and their mother’s (and my sister) around at my place for JJ’s fourth birthday party. Luckily for me it was the nicest day we’ve had for over a week and I was able to host it outside. I’d much rather clean up an outside than an inside party.
I ran around like a mad thing that morning, cooking a birthday cake, washing a week’s worth of dirty dog paw prints off the lino floors, tidying up outside, and then doing the hostess with the mostess thing that afternoon. I organised one game, pin the tail on the donkey, and that wasn’t a big of a hit as I would have liked but everyone got a prize and the closest tail got the big prize (thank god for the $2 shops).
Everyone enjoyed themselves, particularly the birthday boy and he’s gone off to childcare today wearing his number 4 badge he got with one of his birthday cards.
It was his actual birthday yesterday but the reason I didn’t have his party yesterday was because two good friends of mine had a combined 40th on Saturday night and I knew that many of us wouldn’t be up for a kids party on Sunday afternoon.
So onto the combined 40th. It was a big one. It was in a friend’s shed which is normally decked out with six boys bars but us girls did it over for Pussy Galore. I was on one of the bars so as well as decking out the bar for the event, two friends and I had been busy practising two songs to perform on the night with a pussy theme. We did Pussytown (Machine Gun Fellatio) and Funkytown (well, actually we renamed it to Pussytown also) ‘Won’t you take me to, Pussytown?’.
So after the Can Can show by some other bargirls, we all got up on stage and did our Pussytown’s.
If you’ve made it this far here we are. We were all terrified, especially as the first song we had a verse each to sing.
After my friend did her verse and we did the chorus, everyone was clapping and I couldn’t start my verse straight away but then I just started it. It was like experiencing an out of body experience, singing by myself like that and I don’t really remember it at all now.
The shed was packed out and all I could see were faces and I hadn’t had a chance to go to the toilet beforehand so I’m glad I didn’t wet myself in fright.
The two birthday girls absolutely loved it and we all got really great feedback afterwards even though I know we stuffed up a few things and because of the applause throughout we were thrown out of whack a couple of times. A friend said to me afterwards, ‘Where does your confidence come from?’ I said, ‘It’s not confidence, it’s brashness.’ I don’t even know if that’s correct but I like to challenge myself and getting up in front of a big group of friends is one of those challenges and if I don’t instigate performing, it ain’t gonna come to me. And I enjoy it and hopefully some more stuff will come my way.
I got home just as it was getting light around 7.30am yesterday morning with the knowledge that I had a chance of around two hours sleep before I had to pick up JJ, which I did. It’s the first time I’ve stayed out for a whole night since I was in London in 2000. I felt a bit naughty and a bit scared of how I was going to cope with the day ahead.
After picking up JJ and having a two cups of green tea and a chat with the babysitters, JJ and I got home after picking up a copy of the ‘Home on the Range’ DVD (I had to plead with him not to choose Barbie – where did that come from?). We had lunch then went for a bike ride (he did) on his brand new 2 wheeler bike and trainer wheels. Woo hooo!!!! I’ll be getting a bike soon. I didn’t think of this.
Early night last night. Pajamas on at 8pm, bed after Big Brother, around 9pm. Good solid sleep. Bliss.
