Balloons, Kids, and Marginally Obscene Birthday Cakes

We had Avery’s 5th birthday party Sunday evening. Avery wanted a “princess party”, so that become that theme of the event. Guests included 3 boys and 4 girls, including Avery. Per the theme, the girls were dressed in full princess attire, which was about the most adorable thing ever. The boys, as per their custom, came dressed as typical filthy little five year old boys.


For some reason, each year we end up blowing up about a hundred balloons and scattering them about the house for the party. Within about .02 seconds of the first guest’s arrival, we remembered that balloons + little kids = chaos and NOISE. The kids had a riot throwing, catching, chasing, and attacking the balloons. Amazingly, nothing popped until 0:28:00 into the party. Unsurprisingly, this discovery led to balloon pops 2 through 20 within the next 0:00:30.

Balloon chaos theory also suggests, and the data supports that five year olds in a room full of balloon naturally tend to maximize their velocity, while peripheral vision is minimized. Results of this are easily predictable. At most points in time, there was at least one kid having wounds attended, and one kid facing disciplinary action.

For dinner the kids had pizza, as is done in 99.746% kids birthday parties, according to recent studies. We decided it would be fun to let the kids make their own, so we got them each a pita, covered it in pizza sauce, and let them add their own toppings. Being five year olds, toppings meant: 1) cheese, and 2) more cheese. Then back to the chaos while the pizza’s cooked. The party’s one moment of calm came after I removed the pizzas and got the kids seated at the table, each waiting for their “customized” (cheese) pizza. “Who had the broccoli and mushroom pizza?” I asked. Silence…. “They all have broccoli and mushroom!” I declared, to shocked, horrified, but blissfully silent stares from the kids. Note to self: 5 year olds are gullible.

The highlight, and perhaps lowlight, of the party was the cake. Per the theme, Jasmine baked a “princess” cake. It was an impressive sculpture of a cake, where the cake itself too the form of a the lower part of a poofy princess dress, encrusted with shiny red pomegranate “jewels”, and on top of which was a princess Barbie torso, arms, and head. Interestingly, the Barbie torso itself was topless, save for the icing that served as the upper portion of her “dress”. What the kids saw was a pretty princess cake. What I saw (and I wasn’t alone among the grown ups!) saw was a busty topless woman popping out of a cake, covered only in icing. The cake received rave reviews from little girls and adults, accordingly. The little boys were mostly indifferent. As Jasmine cut the cake, Avery licked clean the Barbie torso, taking great care to ensure no tiny bit of icing was wasted. Gluttonous and obscene! Must be a good party…

My own birthday was on Friday. I got a new heart rate monitor / altimeter, which is really cool. I was having trouble for a couple days getting it to download data from the watch to the computer though. In my frustration, I thought perhaps I’d never figure it out. I decided that I could still get all the training benefits of a good heart rate monitor (training by heart rate zone, etc) without downloading data, and that, for me at least, there no real training benefit at analyzing heart rate data on the computer. I think the real purpose in graphing the data on the computer is the ego stroke: “Hey, look how my heart almost exploded on that 1000 foot climb”.

So yesterday I fixed the problem, got the data downloaded, “analyzed” my latest workouts, and stroked my ego appropriately. “Look, Avery, here’s where daddy ran to the top of a huge hill!”. (“Wow daddy” she says. She’s polite, but not yet skilled enough to fake sincerity). :-)