Doug's birthday, crepes, and a bruised ego

Thursday was Doug's birthday. Elisabeth was very excited to give him her gift, which was a plate painted at one of those paint your own pottery places. I took the girls a few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning under the guise of going to the library. Now, when you're in a phase where the almost daily lesson is "lying is bad, tell the truth," teaching your kid to lie to Daddy and tell him that we did really go to the library when we didn't is hard and possibly ill advised. So I told her to tell Daddy that we didn't go to the library, but we couldn't tell him where we went because it was a surprise. That worked quite well, and he didn't pursue it. She would have folded like a piece of paper if he had asked, I don't think the CIA is in her future.

While we were at the pottery store, I held Charlotte while watching Elisabeth paint. Anyone who has ever tried to hold Charlotte knows that she is a wiggly thing who does NOT like to be held for extended periods of time. And putting her down on the floor, in a room full of not inexpensive pottery, is almost quite literally like putting a bull in a china shop. So I held her. I thought to myself, "hey - she can probably hold a paint brush and contribute to the present..." And indeed she can hold a paint brush. She can also suck all of the paint off of the paint brush while you're oohing and aaahing over Elisabeth's handiwork. She looks quite nice with a robin's egg blue colored mouth. They assured me that the paint is non-toxic, but I'm pretty sure this gets on my application for Mother of the Year.

Every year for Doug's birthday, we have a crepe fest. Doug eats crepes with peach and strawberry filling until he's literally ill. On average, I make about 20 crepes. That used to mean 5ish for me, 11ish for Doug, 2ish for Maggie and some leftovers for snacks. This year's crepe fest totals:

Doug: 5.
Me: none.
Maggie: none.
Elisabeth and Charlotte: 15???

It was so very disappointing that Doug didn't get to eat himself sick, and, well, I didn't get to eat at all. So we decided to have Crepe Fest, the Sequel tonight. I tripled the batch, which should mean about 30 crepes. Everyone is stuffed and we have 3 left over. We didn't keep a count, although Doug claims that he's met his match in Elisabeth.

Just after I finished making the crepes, I decided that eating them while wearing my favorite cashmere sweater was ill-advised. So I grabbed my new t-shirt that I got at a barbeque yesterday and said, "I'll just change here and hope no one comes to the door." This piqued Elisabeth's interest. "Why don't you want anyone to come to the door, Mommy?" And I said, "Because I'm changing shirts." And Doug chimed in, "if they came to the door while Mommy was changing clothes, they'd see her without her shirt on." Without missing a beat, Elisabeth said, "And they'd run away???"