I find incredible joy in how often I have to refill the hand soap dispensers in my house. I’m a fascist control freak so my kids know they can’t play with the soap willy-nilly… which means they wash up a lot. Victory!

This is very relevant because yesterday we went to a waste water treatment plan. As in the place where they process all the poop. WASH ALL THE HANDS.

A kid we knew from the home school group we used to hang with was turning five. (He’s in one of the few families that still come over to hang out…) He asked his family for a poop party. Because his family is awesome… they delivered. They had it all. First we went on a tour of the treatment facility so we could learn all about poop. It’s a neat process. They talked about how there are multiple stages of decontamination and removing particles and removing other objects and essentially baking the poop to kill the dangerous bacteria and how is the water purified enough to go back to the bay and…. they usually do school tours. They said they had NEVER been asked to host a birthday party before. Ha.

After the educational and entertaining tour around the plant we used their break room for the party. After games in the courtyard. The games in the courtyard were pretty cool. They played poop the potato and pop the poop. So for poop the potato you had to start on the far side of the courtyard with a potato between your legs and you had to run/walk without dropping the potato alllllll the way to the bucket, then you needed to sit like you were on a toilet and let the potato go. That led to some pretty hilarious antics if you ask me. Pop the poop was just sitting on balloons. Less entertaining but the kids thought it was great. Who doesn’t want to explode a balloon with their butt?

The poop piñata was pretty ridiculous. As is standard for these parties I was the crowd enforcer. It was funny how the mothers I knew from the group kind of sighed and said, “We’ve missed you… it’s so hard to keep them under control for this part of the party.” Not for me! “GET BACK OR YOUR FACE WILL BE SMASHED. NO WE DON’T GET TO SWING THE BAT AGAIN UNTIL YOU GET BACK.” 

In the piñata they had poop shaped stuffies and poop shaped pencil sharpeners and poop rubber duckies and chocolate kisses with poop stickers on them and pencils with plungers on the back and… I feel like there was more I’m forgetting. It was over the top and fabulous and completely on topic and I’m super impressed.

They had poop balloons and poop streamers and a poop happy birthday sign and a poop cake.

The older sister made the poop cake. It was mostly a chocolate layer cake with really thick frosting to shape into a poop pile. But it looked disgusting and tasted delicious. Perfect.

Oh my god. They had little jello shot glasses. The jello was yellow. Inside the bottom of the cup were little chocolate jelly beans. They looked absolutely like a toilet full of pee and poop. It was horrible and yet the kids said it was really tasty. I…. I loved it. Well done y’all.

Sausage pizza of course so the meat bits looked like little poop piles. WHY NOT?!

It was fantastic. I feel like I have never been to so intense of a birthday party. That was themed. And it was fun because I got to see folks I haven’t seen since before the road trip. There was one little girl in particular who saw my kids, squealed so loud she almost shattered ear drums and then barely let FMC be 1′ away from her for the rest of the day. And this little girl has several enby’s in her life so she was super defensive of FMC’s ‘they’ pronoun with everyone at the party. That really rocked for FMC. They felt so loved and seen and important.

It was a fantastic day. I’m grateful we were invited and I’m glad we went even though the driving was kind of stressful.

I felt kind of like a self involved asshole because I kept trying to ask people questions about what is going on with them and they deflected back to “Tell me more about the pregnancy” so I spent most of the day repeating the same information about my physical health and I always worry that makes me overly self involved. But people kept asking me the same questions…. I was trying to get the topic away from me… I just failed.

I like those people and I miss hanging out with them. I don’t miss the driving and there is no way I could rejoin the group. I can’t drive that far consistently. It hurts so much. Oakland and Alameda are just too much driving for frequent socializing.

This is part of why I want to leave the bay. It’s not that there aren’t wonderful people here. But it is necessary to spend 2+ hours/day in the car driving in order to see them and I just physically can’t.

It was nice seeing people after 2.5 years though. It was funny how many of them stood there and argued with me that it couldn’t have been that long. Uhm. I got home 2 years ago from a 6 month trip and I haven’t seen you since returning. How could it be less time elapsed than that!?

This is like people who tell me I got into the bdsm community at 16. Nooo…. I’d remember that. I was an adult.

It’s been a few days since I’ve had the buzzy, panic feeling inside my brain/body. That’s good. It’s a lot easier to be patient/nice when it isn’t happening.