Little One's Fifth

A quiz! What does …


1 Three Musketeers bar

8 large blue corn tortilla chips with chili salsa dip

13 slices of pizza

8 jump shrimp in ketchup-horseradish sauce

18 fudge-dipped finger cookies

7 cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke

1 generous piece of chocolate ganache cake with chocolate icing

Various handfuls of pretzels, potato chips, and puffs.


Equal?

Give up?

My food intake over the past 24 hours.

My wife told me if I was a carebear my name would be Hogbear. A fat little bear with a logo of a turkey drumstick on his stomach.

Oh, wait! I had an apple, too! For the phytochemical nutrients. That’s why I’m not dead. Phytochemicals.

Seriously, yesterday was the Little One’s fifth birthday. Can you believe it? I can’t. Time sure does fly, as the cliché goes (editor’s note: Avoid clichés like the plague!). Where have those five years gone?

A lot’s happened in the half-decade our Little One’s been around. For one, we have this new life – no, more than that – this new person, a person who did not exist six years ago but now does. She has an amazing personality. Not only does she sing and dance and come up with the strangest things, but she’s genuinely a funny girl. She does flash cards with me. She can name all nine planets (yes, Pluto’s still a planet in my house), in order and by sight. She can name all the Jonas brothers. She pulls pranks on my relatives (Aunt John and Uncle Marian). She has more friends than I do. She still likes to cuddle with me.

My wife has had two jobs since she was born. I lost mine. We’ve had a second baby, whose following in her big sister’s footsteps. Heck, Patch adores the Little One. We’re still in the same old house we bought while the Little One was fetal, but have a new basement. I’ve edited the first drafts of my novels. Started this blog. Made contact with a half-dozen lost friends from the distant and not-so-distant past via Facebook. Learned how to play Clapton’s The Core on my acoustic (that song’s eluded me for decades!).

Her party was yesterday, and I must say it was a success. We’re doing the transition from adult relatives to school chums. Because she just started kindergarten in our town, the Little One still doesn’t know enough – or maybe we as parents don’t know enough of the other parents – to have a full-fledged kiddie party, it was a mix. Twelve little ones and twelve adults. Some arts and crafts, a bouncy castle, a bubble machine, pizza and beer, and that awesome ganache cake. The heavy clouds held off, and we all had fun.

Little One made out like a bandit with presents. She really got everything she wanted and more. A scooter, a tennis racket, slippers and robe, a floor puzzle, a Play-Doh ice cream parlor, three outfits for Barbie, an indoor tent, a Lego pony farm … and she hasn’t even opened up our gifts yet (we hold off till the actual day of birth). So now she’s largely ignoring her sister’s one-year-old gifts that she’s all but monopolized over the past two weeks.

Gotta run – need to get to the leftover cookies before the girls do.