Let them eat cake - shaped like Legos.

Birthday, when you're eight and male, means primarily Legos and popping balloons. Amy showed a certain brilliance in planning Ian's birthday party in that, even though she's female - and something of a "chick's chick" at that, she hit the nail on the head in every aspect of planning. A game that consists solely of popping balloons, with the boys (yes, there were girls at the party, but they had their own very separate agenda) - with the boys, in any case, tying balloons to their feet, with narrow strips of red ribbon, and attempting to pop them with the other foot - always successfully, it turned out. And Legos, Legos Everywhere, and Plenty Legos to Eat. Yes, we had edible Legos, of the candy variety, and they were a big component of the party favor set. The party favors themselves were all kinds of small plastic animals - mostly gnarly ones like dinosaurs, and other knick-knacks, including some of Ian's favorites - the masochistic Chinese finger-trap, those woven little tubes, open at both ends, about the size of your finger, into which, surprisingly, you insert both index fingers at either end, and then pull in opposite directions at once, and derive bizarre satisfaction out of the fact that you can't extract either finger from the sinister device.

The cake itself was a multi-layered, multi-colored "Lego" construct, with smaller rectangular legolets constructed on a larger Lego base.

Then there was the Lego bridge-building contest - not a contest where the most insufferable child prodigy goes home with an extra prize, but where, if you succeed in building a bridge out of Legos, you get a prize. Like so many things at this party, it was open and optional, so the Lego-inclined drifted toward it, while others continued to blow up and/or pop balloons, often asking me to tie them for them. Amy also got a small helium tank (it was so light!), and I was The Helium Man. The original idea was simply to inflate helium balloons, tie them to strings of ribbon, and tie the ribbons to each child's chair at the Table of Cake, so that they could bring them home, but of course, several of the children asked me to blow up helium balloons for them separately. Since I'm a dunce, it didn't occur to me until some time into the adventure that a couple of the boys wanted helium balloons primarily so that they could pop them.

The boys constructed Lego-cars - I think the girls even joined in on this one, in spite of their presumed oath of otherness - and I set up a few makeshift runways in the back yard, relying heavily on the gravity of the downward slope, and the children came out to race their Lego cars. They didn't always race well, and I couldn't help saying, playfully, "They're made of Legos - what do you expect!" Heresy.

The best thing about the party was the unrelenting boynergy of it all (yes, that's boy-energy as a single word). It was just constant running and yelping and popping and motion. Amy was afraid we might run out of activities, but the beauty of the whole thing was that a couple of Paradigm Activities, if you will, set the tone for boy-outbursts and innovations that also took on a life of their own, woven in parallel and tandem with the structured program.

Ian seemed very pleased, and was appropriately grateful to Amy for the exhaustive work and planning that she put into it.

And then there was the grown-up party-after-the-party, with a good turnout of relatives from both sides of the family, which was very nice.

Thanks to Amy, the Lego Corporation and the Malaysian latex industry, Ian had a wonderful birthday.

(September, 2011)