Sophie’s cupcakes


The birthday boy

We celebrated Jake’s eighth birthday on Saturday. We had pizza, and Sophie made cupcakes, and I brought the stupidest, most low-rent snacks—Sweet and Sour Filled Twizzlers and Hot Fries.

Jake got a little video camera for his birthday, and before we got to the party he’d already made a video and posted it on YouTube. Kris told us about the video: “He’s trying to be really cool because it’s for YouTube, you know, so he’s like, “Yeah, I’m about to have my cupcake, so leave a comment, say Happy Birthday, whatever. Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.”

Kris thought the video was so cute because Jake was trying to be so cool and yet he was also talking about cupcakes. He’s so little still, only eight.

Sophie told me she has special socks she wears in the pool; she calls them her swimming socks. Sophie’s really fussy about getting her feet dirty; I guess she wants them protected even from water.

Anyway, when it was time to go swimming at Jake’s party, I came down to the pool in my bathing suit and a pair of dirty white crew socks.

Rob hates my bathing suit because it’s a really tight, ill-fitting racing suit, and I wear a skirt over it. He thinks the overall look is totally unstylish and that the two parts don’t go together at all. So he made all kinds of fun of me when I came down in my ugly bathing suit . . . with the unfortunate addition of socks.

“Oh,” he said, smiling, “so you thought you weren’t looking dorky enough already, huh? You thought you’d amp it up, huh?”

“Sophie wears socks to swim!” I cried, laughing. I knew I looked terrible.

“I do,” Sophie said, with a haughty look in her eyes. She was daring anyone to tease her. Nobody did because Sophie is “scary”; she’s so confident.

Sophie and Jake love to “fight.” They love to argue and wrestle. Usually, they fight at every family gathering. But this time, at this party, it wasn’t just Sophie and Jake who were fighting; no, Rob and Matt were getting in on it too. Matt stole Jake’s volleyball and wouldn’t give it back. He was sitting on it in the pool, despite Jake’s loud protests. And Rob was arguing with everything Jake said.

“Who wants to play Marco Polo?” Jake cried.

“Marco Polo?!” Rob protested. “Marco Polo?! Come on! That’s the most boring game in the world!”

So Jake suggested we play “Four Corners.” He went over the rules (at the top of his lungs), and when he was done, Rob said, “Wait a minute. How is that even a game?”

Rob can be ridiculously argumentative. He was being so argumentative that he was exasperating even Jake, who is a famous arguer.

“Dude!” Jake would say. “Dude, shut it!”

Jake was talking (well, shouting) during the entire party, of course, bossing everybody around. He kept trying to organize a game, but nobody was listening or cooperating. Matt and Rob were arguing and causing trouble, and Bun and Kris were talking about Real Housewives as usual. So suddenly Jake started shouting louder than ever from atop his new spaceship float, “Sophie, SHUT UP!!!!!”

“Uh,” Kris ventured, “she’s the only person who wasn’t talking.”

And it was true. Little Sophie was pouting quietly, floating by herself at the shady end of the pool. She had stayed up too late baking Jake’s cupcakes, so she was feeling crabby.

Finally we did organize a game of water volleyball and we played, boys against girls. Jake kept getting mad if we, the girls, laughed when the boys missed a shot.

“Mommy!” He’d cry. “Stop laughing! No laughing! Bunny, no laughing! Okay, stop laughing or you’re out of the party!”

“It’s okay if they laugh, Jake,” Rob counseled. “They’re just sassing us the way we’re sassing them, right?”

“Yeah,” Jake said, “but girl sass is so much more sassier!”

“Well said, Jake,” Rob smiled. “I would have to agree.”

(Bunny and Sophie kept breaking out into a carefully choreographed celebration dance. I was on their team and I still found it annoying.)

Every time the boys were ahead, Jake would say to us girls, “It’s just a friendly game.” And then if we got a point, he’d be threatening to quit and accusing us of cheating.

It was the craziest game. We didn’t have a net, so we had make a sort of line out of pool noodles to stand in for the net. This was Rob’s idea.

“That’ll never work!” Sophie cried.

“Um, yeah,” I agreed. “Look. One’s already floating away.”

“Yeah,” Kris said, “and that one’s curving in on our side.”

I shook my head: “This is totally unfair.”

We played a little volleyball, but mostly we argued about the unfairness of this stupid drifting, curving noodle net. Sophie quit early on in the game and pouted some more over at the other end of the pool.

We truly did spend the whole game arguing in a playful way. And then the next thing I knew Jake was strangling Matt with a pool noodle. It was wrapped around his neck like a python. “Hey,” Matt was saying to Jake in his mumbling, deadpan way, “um, this really isn’t good for me.”

I started getting freezing, so we got out of the pool and started playing Dweebies (a card game) on the deck. I brought the bags of Hot Fries and Sweet and Sour Twizzlers out to the table, and Jake and I bonded over our love of tacky snacks.

“These fries are good,” he said in his cheerful way. “Spicy.”

“I know,” I said. “They are so awesome, right?”

As we played Dweebies, I announced that Rob’s band would be playing a Halloween show at Railroad Square and that we should all go even though we hate music and are afraid to be seen in public.

Kris said, “I still remember going to see my first show. It was at the Alley, in the afternoon. Do you remember the Alley? It was really, really skinny because it was actually an alley. It was this bagel place–no, this deli place. Anyway, it was so boring having to squeeze in there to watch this stupid band, and I remember I couldn’t believe how terrible it was. I was like, ‘This is what people do?’”

“But it’s not,” Rob scoffed in his comical over-the-top Rob way. “It’s not what people do. I mean, come on. An afternoon show at a bagel place? Nobody does that.” He was giving everybody shit at this party. It was awesome.

We were listening to the radio as we played, and Rob was complaining about the station (of course). “Bunny,” Kris said, “change that radio station.”

“Oh, no,” Bunny responded, in a sort of mild panic. “I don’t know anything about radios. . . .”

“Those newfangled contraptions,” Rob smiled. “Leave them to the young people, right?”

We played four-square next, and Jake was awesome, arguing every time he got out. He was also saying other people were out for very specious reasons.

“Dude!” he said to Rob when Rob dove for the ball and hit it into Jake’s square. “You can’t go down so tiny!”

“Yeah!” I said, just because I loved the wonderful nonsensicalness of it. “What are you going down so tiny for, Rob?”

I was trying to fake Sophie out, so I made dramatic, over-the-top eye contact with Jake, then hit the ball to Sophie without even glancing at her. She missed it, and as she was storming out of her square, she cried, “No snake eyes! You didn’t call snake eyes, Leslie!”

I had never heard of “snake eyes” before, but I thought it was a terrific term and I made sure, after that, to call snake eyes every time I was in “A” square.

“Popcorn, bus stops, and snake eyes!” I’d yell.

Rob was calling all kinds of crazy, unconventional games when he was in A: “Okay, let’s say every time you touch the ball, you have to say ‘Rob is great!’” Or: “Okay, let’s say every time you get the ball, you have to freeze and throw it!”

Sophie quit the four-square game right away. She called us losers and stormed off.

Bunny spent the whole game talking about Real Housewives.

At the end of the party, Bun and I went up to Sophie’s room and helped her organize her Liv Doll accessories. We also talked about making a second Liv Doll movie. We decided this one would feature the Liv Dolls at prom—and they would once again be attacked by zombies, but in very glitzy confetti-and-balloon-strewn surroundings.

“This time,” I said, “let’s take more time dressing everybody up. I think that’s very important. The Liv Dolls should be glamorous.”

“Yeah,” Sophie said, “remember that’s what I wanted to do for the first movie but Rob wouldn’t let me? Let’s say Rob can’t be the director this time. Let’s say I’m the director.”

“Okay,” I said. She was very passionate on this subject.

“Because you know what I hate about our last movie?” she went on. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “It was totally half-assed!”

Boy, she had some strong feelings on Rob’s directing, and they continued to come out as we organized the Liv Dolls’ tiny boots and heels and such.

Good ole Sophster

Jake being sweet



Four-square is our family’s very favorite game.