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Let the birthday party mayhem begin!
Without a further thought to my disgusting carpet and the possibility that my house might be too small to fit thirty-some people, I am pressing onwards with a great big green puppet show birthday party. I’m SO EXCITED!!! I didn’t plan a big birthday bash last year and though it was sweet, I sort of missed it…I live for this sort of stuff.
Good thing I birthed a child who seems to be into the hoopla as much as I am. I don’t know what I would do if Bug was the anti-social sort. We’ve been scheming for days. Besides the fact that she thinks every day is her birthday and cries when I can’t magically produce green birthday cake on command, it’s been a lot of fun having her in on the plans.
So far we’ve worked out the food: everything green. The cake: made by Bethany. The Puppet Shows (finger puppets, a big box theatre and a light shadow theatre) and of course a make-your-own-puppet craft table. I think it will be great fun. My only worry is I’m not going to hire anybody to put on a puppet show so that means I need to either recruit my ten-year-old niece or put it on myself. Or both. I will probably suffer from some stage fright but I know I can do it since I used to do this all the time as a kid. I was the queen of puppet shows. But thirty-some people who are not my doting aunts and uncles?…. eeeeeeee!
The invitations are done and mailed so there’s no going back now! We can’t have a puppet show birthday party without a puppet show. Unless there’s somebody out there in internet land who can pull off a puppet show like the ones they have in the Jardin du Luxembourg I think it’s going to be me.
The invitation turned out really cool. You can pull the little tabs at the bottom to make the Bug puppet and the cake puppet bob up and down. I know it will last about five seconds in a child’s hands but it was worth it for the fun. I love making things with paper.
Which leads me to my other problem. I need to stay away from this store!!!! I want to buy everything in it. They are a very handy source for envelopes but I have a very hard time walking by the wall of paper without sampling. Some people have problems collecting fabric. I have problems collecting paper. But that’s okay. I’ll use it someday. I just need to find a place to keep it all organized. I feel a purge coming on.
(Oh lovely. I just noticed I spelled seventeenth wrong on the invitations that are already in the mail. Oh well. It keeps me humble. I’m keepin’ it real.)
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The Bible Conference
Happy New Year! Did you see my new banner? No? Empty your cache and refresh your browser. There it is. Anyway before I go off rambling about the super duper invites I’m designing for Bug’s super-duper-puppet-show birthday party coming up, I think I better say a few words about the bible conference I attended over Christmas weekend.
I usually hate to talk about this stuff because I know some of you will write me off as one of those bible-thumping lunatics and the rest of you will sigh and shake your head that I’m such a coward always shying away from writing about spiritual things because it’s not the popularly accepted thing to do. And then there’s part of me that is embarrassed to admit that I probably only took in about ten percent of what was going on because I was trying to keep my toddler in line and I was distracted by the secret-coded notes my ten-year-old niece was passing right by me. (By the way, my niece may be a bad influence but she is totally clever.)
So we stayed in a fancy hotel, we ate more cookies and I drank more coffee than I really should have… I saw old friends that I haven’t seen in three years or more and I learned some things. I don’t feel like this is the place to discuss them. (Not to mention I don’t want to admit how dumb I am.) But I’m coming around to the fact that I shouldn’t hide that I am a Christian anymore. I know. There goes my readership. But I have to be honest. This is me. Silly fickle me.
I’ve had so many years that I doubted my faith. I was “saved” when I was very young and didn’t really know there was anything else to believe. Then my whole world turned on it’s head when I left the church in my twenties. I didn’t want anything to do with any kind of organized religeon. I’d seen the evil that it (and myself) could do. The Da Vinci Code sent me for a loop. Could Jesus be married? Could the bible be re-written to suit the Catholics in power at the time? I still question everything. I’d say you are a liar or in extreme denial if you don’t.
But I’m coming around. It doesn’t all make logical sense in my head. I still worry that faith is part of my brain’s elaborate plan to fool me out of being afraid of death. But I’m letting go of that. I was raised to trust in Jesus to get me through. I was raised to read the bible for encouragement. Sure it’s sentimental because it reminds me of the safe harbor that was my youth but maybe I want that safe harbor for my kid too. And then there’s the part about prayer. I don’t understand it. It works. I’ve prayed my way through trial after trial and every time I am amazed that somebody up there, who has a million zillion other things to do, actually heard me.
So that is that. I’m sorry if I bored you to tears and you’ll never want to come here again. I’m sorry if I disappointed you because I’m not going to relay what I learned from reading Hebrews 10. I just felt like I had to say something because it happened. I went to a bible conference for three days and it was good for me. I’m not going to be walking door-to-door handing out tracts but I am going to examine why I’m so hesitant to be a Christian in this crazy world. It’s part of who I am. It’s how I want to raise my daughter… maybe I need to just own up and not be so afraid to be a fool in other’s eyes. Maybe I’ve been a fool for hiding it.
A funny thing though: Many of the people at the conference know that I blog. It’s sort of embarrassing but it keeps me on my toes thinking about all the different personalities that will read what I write. So it sort of amused me when I was picking up my free muffins for breakfast that a girl standing nearby whispered to her friend that she wondered how much of this conference would end up on blogspot.com. I don’t blog at blogspot.com and I wasn’t really going to blog about the conference at all. It’s part of my mixed-up private life that I don’t want to discuss with five hundred of my closest imaginary friends. But when she said that, I had to write something. If only just to smile and say, I heard you.
Also? Baby Bug enjoyed it thoroughly. I can’t say the same about her first experience with hot rollers though.
p.s. top photo taken by Bug
