we fail to stick to our guns

As many of our friends and acquaintances (not to mention the more devoted readers of this blog) full well know, Anton and I are opposed to pinatas for small children. We think they promote violence and greediness. There's something so disturbing and perverse about giving little kids a baseball bat and asking them to pulverize a dainty mermaid or an adorable puppy (it's less unsettling if it's a Darth Vader pinata or a star-shaped one, but usually it's a princess or a mermaid or a cute animal, in our experience).

Less aggressive children are punished by receiving little or no swag, and the largest, pushiest children are rewarded for trampling the others. Iris, a shy, underaggressive toddler, cried unconsolably after leaving one birthday party where she got nothing from the pinata (the bully boy toddlers were rolling in the swag that day). Anton desperately offered to take her to a drugstore and buy her all the candy she wanted, but she refused. She wanted the pinata candy, and nothing else would suffice.

So anyhow, Lola is turning four tomorrow, and she was hellbent on having a pinata. We ignored her requests, thinking she'd forget it, but she brought it up again and cried when we said there would be no pinata. Immediately we backed down, and ridiculously today we spent $65 for a huge pinata, larger than the birthday child herself, shaped like SpongeBob's friend, Patrick, not to mention $15 worth of candy to stuff the damn thing with. Lola has already fallen for Patrick ("He's like a friend!") and senses how disturbing it will be to bash him with a stick. I offered to her that we just hang him up as a decoration and keep him, just giving the candy to her friends, but she wants to go through with it.

Dammit, Anton and I have folded on this issue, and to the tune of $80 as well.

My to do list, to be accomplished by 1:00 pm tomorrow afternoon:

- Clean house.
- Make grocery list for food to be served to parents (I'm thinking homemade salsas, at least two, chips, and beer),
- Buy fruit for children (we're also ordering cheese pizzas),
- Bury dead mouse (a moribund mouse wandered into our dining room to die the other day. The six idiotic cats didn't notice it; my cleaning people thought it must have been another one of my pets and left it alone except to show it to me); I made it a cozy nest to pass its last hours in but haven't dealt with its corpse resting in the backyard;
- Finish laundry;
- Create SpongeBob posters to decorate house with;
- Get out SpongeBob crap left over from Iris's 4th birthday (also a SpongeBob party, except that one was also Tiki-ish, and I had more grown-ups present who drank a ton of exotic punch and wore Hawaiian shirts, plus it was 90+ degrees out that day, whereas this party's forecast is cold, foggy, and windy weather).

What I really want to do: go to bed with a novel and my medications. I am Still Sick, but Lola's birthday is no respecter of parental poor health or parental scruples. The Patrick pinata must go up and be beaten with sticks, no matter how sick I am.