"As quick as possible"

Well the birthday party has come and gone. It was a success! An art themed party with minimal decorations, cupcakes, ice cream and juice. We played 3 art inspired games;

1) group draw...1st draw an oval and write your name, pass it to the right. They draw the eyes of whomever has thier name on the paper, pass it to the right. They draw the nose, pass it to the right. They draw the mouth...and so on.

2) if you are an artist, and you suddenly loose the use of your arms, what do you do? Draw with your feet of course! We drew a picture using only our feet! (mostly chicken scratchings!)

3) Monet began to loose his sight at the end of his career. So we paired off, blindfolded one partner, gave the other partner an object and told them to describe it to their blind partner well enough for them to draw it. Obviously they were not allowed to say "draw a pine cone", they had to tell them to draw a circle and then cover it with triangles.

Since none of these were games you could "win", I put all the drawings in a bag and pulled 4 of them for prizes. (I know, gasp! How could I single out individual children, how unfair! Oh get over it, everyone was OK because they all got little German school notebooks and sparkly pencils at the end. Don't you remember your childhood? I wasn't permanently scarred from not getting a prize.)

Then there was about 20 minutes of free play (I had blown up 40 balloons, stupid, stupid, stupid!) that was loud and crazy. But all the children were picked up in a timely manner. It was so reminiscent of some of the parties I went to as a kid.

All in all it was a good, quick, cheap -not your party year, but it would be nice to have a reason to have your new friends over and meet their parents- kind of a birthday party. (We do big birthday parties every other year in our family. And sometimes we just ask for food pantry items to donate instead of gifts.) But when you're young, any party is a pretty good one!

So anyway, the reason for this birthday post 2 weeks after the birthday party, is that my present still has not come! If you will remember back some posts, I bought some roller skates via Ebay,um a well known website. I had some trouble getting it to let me purchase something from German sellers, but I finally was able to purchase a pair of skates from someone in Germany (looks like either a sports store, or a pro-seller who specializes in sports stuff). I got a bunch of emails that said blah blah blah and then "thank you". I assumed all went swell.

But still no skates.

German babysitters came over, and they translated the emails for me to make sure he wasn't waiting on something from me. They verified that he was paid, he got my order, and he "will mail it out as quick as possible". . .

As quick as possible, eh? So that means that over 3 weeks later I do not have them as quick as possible? I'm sure the little German man, got my email, put the skates under his arm and started walking to my house...he will get here as quick as possible!

Well, I guess it is hard to get to the post office when it has hours like mine, Monday through Saturday 10:30am - 11:30am!!

I'll let you know when I get them..."as quick as possible!"!