Isaac's Party and other drama
Isaac's birthday party was on Sunday but I'll get to that in a moment. First I have to post about the tooth drama.
On Friday, his actual 7th birthday, I took him to the Red Sox game. We were fortunate that one of Isaac's friends' parents had tickets to the game that day and when they found out it was his birthday, they gave the tix to us. Wasn't that nice of them?? :)
Sadly though, we missed most of the game! It was the top of the 3rd inning, I think, or maybe the bottom of the second, when Isaac bit into the soft pretzel that he had, after much deliberation, decided to have. (He spent a while going back and forth between pretzel and ice cream.) Barely had he begun eating it before his front top tooth, which had already been a little loose, suddenly came even looser and started bleeding copiously. Blood running out of his mouth and soaking the half-chewed piece of pretzel which he could neither swallow nor spit out -- yeah, it was gross.
I was so flustered that I couldn't remember whether I had napkins or tissues in my bag (I did) so I got him up and started toward the stairs so we could go to the concession stand and get some napkins. Well, a security guy saw us coming, and he must have just seen "kid with bloody mouth" so he got on his walkie-talkie and by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs there were like half a dozen security people, concession people, and medical people waiting to converge on us. LOL. Poor Isaac was sobbing and holding his mouth open because he was afraid to close it, the blood was still coming, the pretzel was long forgotten. They took us into a little storeroom off the concession stand and sat Isaac down and tried to get him to drink some ice-water. The concession lady even brought him a free cup of ice cream, which he refused to touch. One of the medical people took a look in his mouth and agreed that the tooth was very loose, but she wasn't about to just pull it out especially since he was flinching away from her. Oy!
The bleeding stopped fairly quickly, but Isaac was still freaking out. They suggested that we might be more comfortable in the medical room, where it would be quieter. So they walked us over there, and may I say, the medical room at Fenway is pretty nice. It's indeed quiet, has its own little bathroom, and a TV for watching the game. We sat on a stool while I tried to calm Isaac down and the doctor on shift chattered at us about how he once lost two teeth in the same cheeseburger. LOL. Finally Isaac calmed down but was still refusing to close his mouth, so he was starting to drool, so the guy gave us one of those kidney-shaped basin thingies to hold under his chin. Then Isaac was mostly happy to just sit there watching the game on the TV, LOL!
But I was anxious and twitchy because I had realized that I didn't have my cell phone. I didn't know whether I had dropped it at our seats, on the stairs, in the little storeroom, or somewhere between the storeroom and the medical room, but it was making me very nervous (plus I was annoyed that I couldn't tweet the situation ;) ). After a while I managed to coach Isaac into closing his mouth, and that went okay, and then he figured out how to swallow and talk and so forth without disturbing the tooth. So finally we left the medical room and went back to our seats, where I was enormously relieved to find my cellphone under the seat undamaged.
By this point it was past 9:00, it was around the 7th inning or so, and the Red Sox were winning 12-0, so I decided we had better just leave. And it was definitely the right choice. Isaac practically fell asleep on me on the bus, and when we got home he fell into bed and was out like a light.
So the game was a bust, alas. :( The Sox won, but we barely saw any of it. Oh well.
The tooth remained in Isaac's mouth, extremely loose, all through Saturday. Isaac barely ate all day because he was too nervous about jiggling it. So then he was hungry and cranky. *Eyeroll* He managed to figure out how to eat by the end of the day, though -- just in time to lick the beaters after I baked his cake. ;) Speaking of which, more on the cake later.
Sunday morning, Isaac was horsing around on my bed with Ruthie when something happened to loosen the tooth even further. It was hanging down -- I truly see what people mean when they say "hanging by a thread" -- I couldn't believe it was still managing to hang on. It was ridiculous. Isaac was whining and complaining about it, but he still wouldn't let me pull it out nor would he pull it out himself. He just sat drooling into a cup and complained that it was "not fair" that Ruthie got to lick a beater of the frosting and he didn't. *Massive Mega-Eyeroll*
The trouble is that I'm pretty squeamish about loose teeth (was even when I was a kid) so I wasn't particularly motivated to force the issue. Luckily, I knew that I didn't have to, because my mom was coming over to help get ready for the party. ;) Sure enough, as soon as grandma arrived, she pulled the tooth out (which took almost no effort at all, so loose it was) and then all was well. Huzzah!!
Here's a picture of the big gap in Isaac's mouth:
Then it was time for Isaac's party, and a good party it was. Like every year, I fretted and fretted about the weather -- it looked like rain for sure, so I tried to plan a bunch of indoor activities and hoped like hell that the kids wouldn't destroy my apartment ;) -- but just like every year, I got incredibly lucky and the weather held. It was cloudy and on the cool side, but not actually raining so we spent basically the whole party outside in our back yard. Yay!!!
Isaac and his friends did get a little wild, but it was okay. There were six 7-year-olds and two 4-year-olds (Ruthie and cousin Baz) which was a good number.
We tie-dyed t-shirts for the party activity. I had wanted to do that last year but wasn't sure the kids were up for it -- this year I decided to go for it. Big thanks to my friend Julie (pedrosmom) for all the tips and info. It went really well. I had everything prepped and ready, and the kids seemed to really enjoy it. Of course, the sad part is that the shirts have to sit in the dye for 24 hours, so I didn't get to see what any of the other ones looked like, other than Isaac's and Ruthie's. I hope the other parents will send me some pix.
Here are my kids wearing the shirts that they made:
Oh yeah, you also get to see Ruthie's new haircut, which I talked about but haven't actually posted pix of here yet. :)
For the party, I made again the rainbow cake, which I had made for Ruthie's birthday as well. Oops, I just went back and looked and I see that I never posted the pix of Ruthie's cake here. Well, to recap, the basic idea comes from here and what you basically do is mix up the batter for a white cake, divide the batter into six portions, color each portion a color of the rainbow (and you HAVE to use the gel food coloring -- it gets the colors so bright and vivid not like the liquid stuff), then you sploop each color into the pan one at a time, in order (and yes "sploop" is the technical term used by professional bakers), and it bakes up into a rainbow. It looks so cool, as you'll see in a moment. In fact, it looks a lot like tie-dye, so we should really call it tie-dye cake given that we tie-dyed at the party! :) But it's really neat-looking and what the kids really like about it is that you frost it, and it looks just like an ordinary cake, and then you cut it and all your friends go "Wow!"
Anyway, Isaac decided that he wanted white frosting on his cake, not chocolate frosting like Ruthie had. So I was mixing up the frosting and then I thought that it might look kind of boring just all white, so I thought maybe I could use some of the leftover food coloring to make decorations; but as it turned out, the frosting recipe made just exactly enough to cover the cake, so there was none left for getting creative with. ;) But then I was looking at it, and I thought, gee, it's round and white. What's round and white and the object of a deep abiding obsession for Isaac? Duh, a baseball of course!!
So I used chocolate chips and red sprinkles (which I laboriously picked out of the container of multicolored sprinkles) to turn the cake into a baseball cake. I'm very proud of it. :) It came out great!
These great pictures of the cake are courtesy of Isaac's friend H's dad.
Phew!!! I could go on and on, but this post is long enough already. ;)
On Friday, his actual 7th birthday, I took him to the Red Sox game. We were fortunate that one of Isaac's friends' parents had tickets to the game that day and when they found out it was his birthday, they gave the tix to us. Wasn't that nice of them?? :)
Sadly though, we missed most of the game! It was the top of the 3rd inning, I think, or maybe the bottom of the second, when Isaac bit into the soft pretzel that he had, after much deliberation, decided to have. (He spent a while going back and forth between pretzel and ice cream.) Barely had he begun eating it before his front top tooth, which had already been a little loose, suddenly came even looser and started bleeding copiously. Blood running out of his mouth and soaking the half-chewed piece of pretzel which he could neither swallow nor spit out -- yeah, it was gross.
I was so flustered that I couldn't remember whether I had napkins or tissues in my bag (I did) so I got him up and started toward the stairs so we could go to the concession stand and get some napkins. Well, a security guy saw us coming, and he must have just seen "kid with bloody mouth" so he got on his walkie-talkie and by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs there were like half a dozen security people, concession people, and medical people waiting to converge on us. LOL. Poor Isaac was sobbing and holding his mouth open because he was afraid to close it, the blood was still coming, the pretzel was long forgotten. They took us into a little storeroom off the concession stand and sat Isaac down and tried to get him to drink some ice-water. The concession lady even brought him a free cup of ice cream, which he refused to touch. One of the medical people took a look in his mouth and agreed that the tooth was very loose, but she wasn't about to just pull it out especially since he was flinching away from her. Oy!
The bleeding stopped fairly quickly, but Isaac was still freaking out. They suggested that we might be more comfortable in the medical room, where it would be quieter. So they walked us over there, and may I say, the medical room at Fenway is pretty nice. It's indeed quiet, has its own little bathroom, and a TV for watching the game. We sat on a stool while I tried to calm Isaac down and the doctor on shift chattered at us about how he once lost two teeth in the same cheeseburger. LOL. Finally Isaac calmed down but was still refusing to close his mouth, so he was starting to drool, so the guy gave us one of those kidney-shaped basin thingies to hold under his chin. Then Isaac was mostly happy to just sit there watching the game on the TV, LOL!
But I was anxious and twitchy because I had realized that I didn't have my cell phone. I didn't know whether I had dropped it at our seats, on the stairs, in the little storeroom, or somewhere between the storeroom and the medical room, but it was making me very nervous (plus I was annoyed that I couldn't tweet the situation ;) ). After a while I managed to coach Isaac into closing his mouth, and that went okay, and then he figured out how to swallow and talk and so forth without disturbing the tooth. So finally we left the medical room and went back to our seats, where I was enormously relieved to find my cellphone under the seat undamaged.
By this point it was past 9:00, it was around the 7th inning or so, and the Red Sox were winning 12-0, so I decided we had better just leave. And it was definitely the right choice. Isaac practically fell asleep on me on the bus, and when we got home he fell into bed and was out like a light.
So the game was a bust, alas. :( The Sox won, but we barely saw any of it. Oh well.
The tooth remained in Isaac's mouth, extremely loose, all through Saturday. Isaac barely ate all day because he was too nervous about jiggling it. So then he was hungry and cranky. *Eyeroll* He managed to figure out how to eat by the end of the day, though -- just in time to lick the beaters after I baked his cake. ;) Speaking of which, more on the cake later.
Sunday morning, Isaac was horsing around on my bed with Ruthie when something happened to loosen the tooth even further. It was hanging down -- I truly see what people mean when they say "hanging by a thread" -- I couldn't believe it was still managing to hang on. It was ridiculous. Isaac was whining and complaining about it, but he still wouldn't let me pull it out nor would he pull it out himself. He just sat drooling into a cup and complained that it was "not fair" that Ruthie got to lick a beater of the frosting and he didn't. *Massive Mega-Eyeroll*
The trouble is that I'm pretty squeamish about loose teeth (was even when I was a kid) so I wasn't particularly motivated to force the issue. Luckily, I knew that I didn't have to, because my mom was coming over to help get ready for the party. ;) Sure enough, as soon as grandma arrived, she pulled the tooth out (which took almost no effort at all, so loose it was) and then all was well. Huzzah!!
Here's a picture of the big gap in Isaac's mouth:
Then it was time for Isaac's party, and a good party it was. Like every year, I fretted and fretted about the weather -- it looked like rain for sure, so I tried to plan a bunch of indoor activities and hoped like hell that the kids wouldn't destroy my apartment ;) -- but just like every year, I got incredibly lucky and the weather held. It was cloudy and on the cool side, but not actually raining so we spent basically the whole party outside in our back yard. Yay!!!
Isaac and his friends did get a little wild, but it was okay. There were six 7-year-olds and two 4-year-olds (Ruthie and cousin Baz) which was a good number.
We tie-dyed t-shirts for the party activity. I had wanted to do that last year but wasn't sure the kids were up for it -- this year I decided to go for it. Big thanks to my friend Julie (pedrosmom) for all the tips and info. It went really well. I had everything prepped and ready, and the kids seemed to really enjoy it. Of course, the sad part is that the shirts have to sit in the dye for 24 hours, so I didn't get to see what any of the other ones looked like, other than Isaac's and Ruthie's. I hope the other parents will send me some pix.
Here are my kids wearing the shirts that they made:
Oh yeah, you also get to see Ruthie's new haircut, which I talked about but haven't actually posted pix of here yet. :)
For the party, I made again the rainbow cake, which I had made for Ruthie's birthday as well. Oops, I just went back and looked and I see that I never posted the pix of Ruthie's cake here. Well, to recap, the basic idea comes from here and what you basically do is mix up the batter for a white cake, divide the batter into six portions, color each portion a color of the rainbow (and you HAVE to use the gel food coloring -- it gets the colors so bright and vivid not like the liquid stuff), then you sploop each color into the pan one at a time, in order (and yes "sploop" is the technical term used by professional bakers), and it bakes up into a rainbow. It looks so cool, as you'll see in a moment. In fact, it looks a lot like tie-dye, so we should really call it tie-dye cake given that we tie-dyed at the party! :) But it's really neat-looking and what the kids really like about it is that you frost it, and it looks just like an ordinary cake, and then you cut it and all your friends go "Wow!"
Anyway, Isaac decided that he wanted white frosting on his cake, not chocolate frosting like Ruthie had. So I was mixing up the frosting and then I thought that it might look kind of boring just all white, so I thought maybe I could use some of the leftover food coloring to make decorations; but as it turned out, the frosting recipe made just exactly enough to cover the cake, so there was none left for getting creative with. ;) But then I was looking at it, and I thought, gee, it's round and white. What's round and white and the object of a deep abiding obsession for Isaac? Duh, a baseball of course!!
So I used chocolate chips and red sprinkles (which I laboriously picked out of the container of multicolored sprinkles) to turn the cake into a baseball cake. I'm very proud of it. :) It came out great!
These great pictures of the cake are courtesy of Isaac's friend H's dad.
Phew!!! I could go on and on, but this post is long enough already. ;)