No, not me. Her. She cheats! She decided her first card was a free pass to the Lollipop. Then after she ended up behind me (an appearance of the Candy Cane shortly before she reached the Castle!), she decided that she could go straight to the Candy Castle without, you know, going through the torture of picking the cards.

Where does this behavior come from?

Actually, I totally lied: before I get to the server thing, I have a word to say about Sophia’s presents.

Barbie totally rules the roost. On Saturday morning, Sophia owned a total of zero Barbies. Saturday night, four Barbies (plus accoutrements). Four different Barbies, actually—evidently there must be a heck of a lot of Barbie flavors. I’m not a crazy Barbie hater—I actually got into Barbie fairly late (about age 10) and really enjoyed playing with them. I had the Barbie penthouse and everything. I never thought I was supposed to look like her—she had long straight blond hair and I had short curly brown hair, and that was just one point on which we differed. She was a doll, not a role model.

Darin is very unhappy about the Barbies. We’re going to keep an eye on Sophia’s attitude toward it.

Running a close second to Barbies in the gift category was Princesses. Specifically Disney Princesses. Which, in case you haven’t been sucked into a Disney store recently, are: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine. Two of the Barbies were Princesses: Princess Barbie and Cinderella Barbie. Disney Princess storybooks. I’m feeling the need to editorialize as I read these stories to her. (In “Aladdin,” the Sultan tells Jasmine she needs to get married so that she can have someone to take care of her. Use your own imagination as to what I told Sophia as I read that.)

Sophia also got building toys, like K’Nex and Tinkertoys. So not everyone thinks girls are all about fluffiness and gorgeous clothes.

Man, running a party for approximately 8 million 3-year-olds really takes it out of you. Damn good thing we had it on a Saturday and not on Sunday—for one thing, the weather was better on Saturday, and for another, given how we were feeling the day after the party, if we’d had it Sunday Darin would have missed Monday at work due to unforeseen coma.

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We had a petting zoo at the party. Tamar told me about a party she’d heard about that had a petting zoo; that sounded good to me, so I called them up. Had never seen them in action. Could have been anything.

Turned out to be pretty good:

They had that miniature horse, plus bunnies, chickens, two goats, and a little pig. You could feed the miniature horse, which I did to show Sophia how it was done. She didn’t want to do it after that. No, she just wanted me to keep feeding the horse for her.

Even Simon got into the action:

The kids loved the petting zoo. This was definitely a big hit. And if you’re going to have a party at your house and you don’t want to, you know, entertain for three hours, you can’t go wrong with animals:

The petting zoo even came with a pony for rides. Everyone wanted a ride. As far as I know, everyone got a ride. Despite Sophia’s expression in this picture, she loved riding the pony:

The pièce de résistance was, of course, the cake, which we got (as we have for birthdays 1 and 2) from Sweet Lady Jane. Massively expensive, but you know: this was the cake. The cake is the first thing we bought for our wedding, too. Darin and I have priorities.

As you can see from this picture, the kids were expecting their cake now. You can almost hear them chanting, “Give us cake!” to the tune of “At-ti-ca!”, can’t you?

It was a great party. Exhausting and exhiliarating. I think Sophia had a great time having her friends there, running around, generally getting to be a three-year-old. She had been excited all week about her party and when the time actually came I think it lived up to her expectations. I know I was certainly extremely happy the way it came out!

(The only downer for me is that I was so busy running around and making sure that everything was running okay, corralling kids for the pony rides, getting the cake together, etc., that I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to anybody. But everyone I did chat with for their allotted 23.6 seconds managed to say, “What an excellent party!” Which was extremely gratifying.)

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After the party Tamar, Dan, and Damian hung out with us for a while. All the adults vegged out in the living room, unable to move another muscle. Well, almost unable: at one point Scott said, “That sounds like presents being opened,” and Mommy (that’s me) went rushing down the stairs screaming at the top of her lungs to discover that yes, at least 6 presents had been opened and I hadn’t the slightest idea of who went with which present.

Calling people up and saying, “Um, what did you get Sophia?” is not my idea of a good time. But it happens, I guess.

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Saturday night the kids slept very poorly—Simon woke up twice (he’s been sleeping through the night for the past couple of weeks) and Sophia was clearly suffering from bad dreams or being too exhausted or maybe both.

They woke up at 6 and Darin went up to sit with them (or lay on the couch with them); I went up at 7 to spell him and he went back to sleep for 2 hours. Then he got up and I lay down with Simon for a good 2 hour nap. The four of us went out to breakfast with Uncles Scott and Mitch, and Sophia proceeded to pass out on the way to the restaurant and to sleep all the way through lunch. We were all pretty logy all day.

Somehow in the afternoon Mitch and Scott worked up the energy to take down our server, load up their car, drive all the way back to the Bay Area, install our server in its new location, and then go to their respective houses. More power to them. I would have driven off the road around Bakersfield.

Why was our server taken down and moved to an Undisclosed Location far, far away? I’ll get to that in my next entry.