CAKE! TACOS!

A post for those who prefer books with pictures to books with more words because there are no pictures.

Eve woke up one day and turned five.  She was sent to school with an 80s cookie cake because of her love for Huey Lewis and because neon icing like totally tastes the best.

Her teacher divided up most of the cake- which was more than sixty cookies worth of dough- between eight children.  It is no wonder the kids follow her around like she's Jesus sharing loaves of bread; it's snack time, they're hungry, and they don't want fish.

Then we went to Taco Bell.  I don't think I need to give you a good reason for this other than it was lunch time.

Turning your Taco Bell portraiture into black and white automatically classes it up.

Next, off to get some ears pierced.  

Cake, check.  Tacos, check.  Earrings, check.

Now we need more cake.  SHE HAD CANCER!  GIVE HER WHAT SHE DEMANDS!

And Eve says we need more sprinkles.

And apparently this is enough sprinkles, but maybe only because we ran out.

And when your birthday is the last of the year, you get everyone's leftover candles.  Which jive pretty well with everyone's leftover sprinklage.

Aaand if you want corn dogs and french fries and grape soda and fresh vegetables (So I don't get fat, Mommy), by God, you're getting corn dogs and french fries and grape soda and fresh vegetables.  Because you had cancer that sounds AWESOME and I'm hungry.

Eve woke up one morning and had a birthday party.  There were witches.  

There was Sonic the Hedgehog*.

*Daniel's costume was made for less than $5 by cutting up shirts and hot-gluing pieces of cut-up shirts together.  The result was mind-blowing for him, as he was planning on making the entire costume out of brown paper grocery bags and highlighters.

There were air guitars and confusion.

There was foooooood**.

**Which tastes better than foood.

There were crafts.

There were wild things letting the wild ruckus begin.

There were pinatas***.

***Matt: "Are you gluing napkins to that pinata?"
Me: "Yes.  Why?"
Matt: silence.
Me: "There are no pumpkin pinatas at the store!"
Matt: silence.
Me: "I really like gluing things together."

There was an early pinata death after the second child in line had her way with the stick****.

****Tests confirm Natalie was doping.  She is banned from professional pinata whacking, in addition to being stripped of all previous pinata whacking titles won since 2005.

There was candy and there were vultures.

There were crazy eyes.

There were wishes*****.

*****And crumbs.  Dear God, there were crumbs.

Eve woke up after the crumbs were eventually cleaned up and went to the pediatrician for her five-year check-up.  She came covered in Emla.  She got all vaccinated for kindergarten.  She found out Emla that expired in July 2010 will still work.  She would never start this many sentences with she.

Don't ever throw away Emla.  It's like liquid gold, but instead of being all melty and yellow and worth tons of money, it's white and it's creamy and will get you all numb.  GET YOU ALL NUMB.  Scroll back up to the ear piercing pictures and see if you figure out why it didn't even hurt.  Or just put together the clues and deduce that the answer is Emla.

I would have even tried it on my lady parts when the epidural didn't work if I had access to it.  Emla may not have quenched the ring of fire, but at least I would have felt like I was doing something, if not delivering all 8 lb. 14 oz. of Eve without something to anesthetize my nether-regions.

I had always heard that with the first kid, you sterilize the pacifier anytime it falls out of baby's mouth before putting it back in.  With the second kid, you wipe it off on your shirt before putting it back in.  With the third, you take it out of the dog's mouth before putting it back in.  It's pretty much true, except we didn't have a dog or a pacifier, just a baby that we sent to the nursery (first time mothers don't appreciate the hospital nursery until it's in the rear view window) until it was time to go home so we could come up with a name in peace.

A NAME.  FOR A TWO-DAY-OLD BABY.  WHO WAS NOT A "SURPRISE!  YOU THOUGHT YOU JUST WERE EATING A LOT AND WERE GETTING SOME BAD INDIGESTION BUT NOW YOU'RE DELIVERING A BABY YOU HAD NO IDEA WAS GROWING INSIDE OF YOU!" BABY.

So, yeah, eight months of knowing I was pregnant was apparently not enough time to convince Matt to stop changing the subject anytime I wanted to talk about baby names.  But we got her back from the nursery once we decided on a name and I let her stay in the room with me for those few minutes before we were discharged.  I can't room with someone whose name I don't know, and as a general rule, this is good advice.  Except maybe if the person you don't know is someone you've just birthed or a fellow survivor of a high-level disaster.  Because I have to admit that if aliens attack (and they will) and there are only two of us left on this earth that haven't been probed or beamed up into the mothership, I will probably let them room with me in my iron bunker, no questions asked.  Because after a traumatic experience like that, you'd probably want to start over with a new name, anyway.

So, sometime during all of this- between my tangent and the birthday and the birthday party and the birthday shots (not THOSE kind of shots, you lush)- lies the third anniversary of Eve's diagnosis.  Sometime during all of this, I just didn't even care.  CAKE!  TACOS!