Birthday celebrations

It's been a big week around here. The celebrations started a week ago, when Janelle and I presented Kali with her first 6-year birthday gift. She had been trying to guess the mysterious item (that we had agonized over bidding on from Ebay one evening) for several weeks. The hints were: It is silver in color, it's not something that would usually be thought of as a toy for children, and she wouldn't know what it was when she opened it up.

Neither would you, if you saw it. I'll confess that I've been secretly longing to get to know this contraption ever since I saw them for sale in the "Sausage Maker" catalog. [Insert photo] It is a pasta making machine! For the girl would loves noodles so much, and who takes such interest in getting involved in the various processes essential to homemaking as we practice it, what could be better? You get to mix ingredients, work them into dough, turn a fancy crank while feeding the dough through rollers and then cutters, and NOODLES come out, ready to cook immediately! Scrumptious noodles, I might add. There IS a difference between prefab noodles and fresh ones, we are learning.

That was Thursday, and on Friday Grandpa and Grandma Myers were here to help us christen the machine by making a huge pot of spaghetti with cheese (we don't have a macaroni attachment for the thing). The recipe made more noodles than we realized, so we mixed cheese sauce with half, and then tossed the other half with basil, olive oil and garlic. Hungry yet?

The food was for the first of Kali's two parties. This one was for a few family members and our neighbors. Completing the menu were garden tomatoes, canned green beans (not summer food, but a birthday request), homemade rolls, olives, and two roasted chickens from this year's brood. I forgot how good roasted chicken can be.

Humor me by tolerating this digression: the roasted chicken was not fabulously, remarkably, over-the-top delectable...but it was, in my opinion, every bit as tender as you would expect a roasted chicken to be, and the flavor of the meat would put factory-produced chicken to shame. The fact that this was accomplished with ordinary home-raising methods with a nearly extinct heritage chicken breed of Canadian origin may not impress you. I, on the other hand, am having a hard time repressing my enthusiasm in unappreciative company. Buff Chantecler hatching eggs will, in all likelihood, become available from our little flock this spring. If you are in the market for a winter-hardy-yet-heat-tolerant, dual-purpose (meat and eggs) bird with a good attitude and reasonable productivity, I urge you to contact me: help out a breed in peril! We will also likely have hatching eggs available from Silver-Laced Wyandottes, a very old American breed with a good year-round homestead reputation, and a dazzling plumage pattern. If we don't get rid of our breeding flock of Cuckoo Marans this fall (large birds of French origin that lay a lot of dark brown eggs...contact me if you want three breeder hens and a rooster), we could also have Cuckoo Marans eggs available. Also, Buckeye roosters may be available for "stud services" and/or adoption. Enough chicken talk.

Despite the children's exuberent concert drowning out most conversation for the second half of the evening, we enjoyed being together with family and neighbors to celebrate Kali's temporal achievement.

The next evening was the time for Kali's "friends" guest list to materialize in the flesh. Unfortunately, only one friend her own age was able to make it, but perhaps it's just as well, since she loves being around younger children nearly as well, if not better. There's always that pang, when we see her playing with younger children, of knowing what a loving big sister she was, is, and would have been for Nora.

It was a "pool party," Kali style. We filled the little wading pools that morning and let the sun warm them. Then at party time we put the fast end of the slide in the water, added children, and waited to see what would happen. The details are unimportant, but suffice it to say that there were lots of wet smiles, some negotiations took place around splashing policy, and the water was substantially dirtier at the end. It was also fun to see Kali putting her whole weight into sending the balloons up through the treetops. I suppose I'll be occasionally finding and picking up broken balloon pieces from the yard until next August, but I count it worth the trouble.

We had a few days to savor that fun until my sister E arrived from D.C. to attend a faculty/staff conference at EMU. She met us at the Rockingham County Fair for an evening of gratuitous people-watching, small-town thrill-show gawking, animal admiring and petting, and the ignoring of the ordinary constraints of gravity in the pursuit of some garden-variety six-year-old kinetic amusement (carnival rides). We hardly wanted to spend the 2-5 dollars per ride for ourselves to be underwhelmed for a few minutes, so we stood at the sidelines while E accompanied Kali. Sometimes Kali's smiles were wide, sometimes her eyes were. Always she claimed afterward to have had fun, even though each of the rides were "scary at first." E tells us we were the classic parents, waving unself-conciously and completely dorkily (my words) each time their child circled around to their side. If you could keep from being too distracted by the giant, inflatable vinyl, bright pink fake electric guitars, it was a little bit of heaven.

Also dorky was our little picnic on the lawn. While all the normal people were scarfing their fried starch and/or meat products with powdered sugar or ketchup on top (and hogging all the picnic tables), we arranged our little cooler full of food on a grassy spot near the pavilion and proceeded to munch our way through quite a stash of homemade rolls with natural creamy peanut butter and wild blackberry jam, garden fresh cucumber rounds, carrots sticks, chunks of farmer's market melon, corn chips, and leftover birthday cupcakes (Grandma Myers' getting-more-famous-all-the-time Moist Chocolate Cake), all washed down with generous yellow Tupperware cupfuls of our signature home brew: Imported From Keezletown Artisian Well Water (An Excellent Source of Soluble Calcium Carbonate). Truth be told, the fries smelled pretty good, but I bet I went home feeling better in the gut than the average fairgoer. A few more rides, a few more shows, and home we went.

And so the major events of the birthday festivities drew to a close. It's no wonder that for children there is no holiday more entrancing than their own birthday. So many trusted, admired, cared-for people turning to them and noticing and appreciating them, not for anything they've done or any particular habits or behaviors they exhibit, but rather just because they exist, and they belong.

More birthday pictures online at http://picasaweb.google.com/bennerj8/KaliSBirthday# and http://picasaweb.google.com/blauchs/KaliS6thBirthdayParty#