OK, OK. Game over. I confess: my last post about the play-date with Baby Daddy and co. and his subsequent rebuttal, were totally planned by the two of us, purely bogus and meant only for fun. In truth, I think the whole Almond family is delightful, particularly the newest member. We were just goofin'.
It wasn't our intent to dupe anyone -- we thought folks would know we were kidding. We just wanted to satirize the whole fawning, "my kid is the center of the universe" nature of parental blogging. And maybe also mock how snarky and downright mean people can be to each other on blogs -- as if basic standards of courtesy and kindness somehow don't apply on the internets. The fact that so many readers thought we were being serious suggests that the situation is even worse than I thought. Are there people out there who are really that horrible to each other in their blogs? Yeesh!
If you were offended or unamused or annoyed by our silliness, what can I say: it's hard to resist a little mischief now and then. Especially after the stress of the holidays. Self-indulgent mischief? No doubt. But then, isn't this whole business of baby blogging (All narrative blogging? All memoir, commentary and opinion?) a little bit self-indulgent on some level? We were attempting to make fun of that --- and ourselves, by extension -- too. Gosh, It's so, like, totally meta and post-modern and self-aware of our self-awareness. Blah blah blah. Snore...
Anyway, back to the regularly scheduled program: We had a sweet, loud, absurd and chaotic party for Elsa and Clio to celebrate their first birthday last week. We slightly underestimated how many people would actually accept the invitation and more than slightly overestimated the size of our house, so it was a wee bit crowded. But it was also a lot of fun. I now have a new theory, that the ear-shattering baby screaming you endure in the early months of new parenthood actually serves an important purpose: it deafens you slightly, so that a year later, when you start having parties and play dates with multiple babbling / crying / yelling babies and toddlers, it doesn't bother you quite so much.
Here's a snap of the grand celebration. Note the bedecked garland o'er the windows -- my Very Martha solution to the fact that if we'd gotten a tree, the babies would have eaten everything on it and/or pulled it over. Note also our friends Steve, Erin, and Josie Almond beneath said garland, eating Oswalda and Clita's birthday cake. (We invited them; they didn't crash. Honest.)
Happy New Year, dear readers.
