Green legs and dead dogs

So the party’s over and the mountain of mess is still hanging around. Our grass is red and yellow, our neighbours are traumatised and last count we had three black eyes among the guests.
Daniel turned six on Saturday and we had our party at our house. There were 31 six year olds, a scattering of babies and a few mums, dads and grandfolk. I baked three cakes and bought about £35 worth of sweets and enough lemonade to fill a bath.
The magician we always book to entertain the kids was previously engaged elsewhere so we too it upon ourselves to provide entertainment. Although something of this scale should really have been planned well in advance the husband and I, being kid’s party professionals at this stage, decided two hours would be time enough to whip something up. Maybe in a parallel universe where seconds are longer it might.
So with two hours to go and nothing to entertain the kids with we decided we’d paint a stack of crisp boxes with white emulsion, stick them together with masking tape and pretend they were cars. Only thing was when we did it they looked like a stack of crisp boxes we painted with emulsion, stuck with tape and pretended they were cars – in other words pathetic.
The idea was to give the kids paint and brushes and let them loose to create bright coloured box cars they could wear to race. But in an incredibly stupid move I stapled my thumb to a box and the husband, who in all fairness has very scant artistic flair when it comes to box cars, tried his best to save the day.
Disaster is maybe too strong a word to describe what the end result was, but one notch down from disaster appropriately paints the picture. There was talk of scrapping the boxes and instead parking my Mum’s Ford Focus in the garden and letting the kids loose with the paint brushes, but we couldn’t distract her long enough to swipe the keys.
The husband also fashioned what can only be loosely described as a ‘race track’ from bin liners and masking tape in the living room. Words failed me when I saw the fruits of his imagination, and I wasn’t struck dumb with awe. I think that was the exact moment when I gave up the will to ever invite 30 children into my home again.
There was the usual bumped heads, black eyes and sugar-induced meltdowns, two people left one shoe less than when they came and a few went home with green coloured limbs, but the fact that they actually had all their limbs intact when they left was in my eyes a victory.
There was a slight hoo-ha when some of the girls spotted a little cross marking the spot where our neighbour had buried their dearly departed dog near their oil tank, but the mass hysteria and screaming stopped when ice cream cones where produced and Fluffy was soon forgotten.
All in all a fabulously memorable day.