November 30, 2006 - Thursday
I think we finally got a good enough handle yesterday on how to pull off our plan (building a dinosaur excavation site in our basement, featuring sand and plaster and a digging up a 5-foot dinosaur model) for Harry's birthday party here at our house. And that meant that Harry needed to get the invitations out as soon as possible. Since only two of the invitees are from Harry's class this year, we actually ended up hand-delivering most of them directly to the friends' houses. Ian's mom was easy. She was sitting outside waiting for the bus, but we ended up putting the other four in mailboxes on the way to get Jeremy at school and Harry thought it was pretty fun to play the postman.

We did encourage Harry to keep the numbers down this year (7 invitees, plus Harry and Jeremy) since the plan is for a rather focused activity. And already it's clear that he is being torn between inviting old friends and new friends. That includes both the tacet obligation to invite once very good friends who he rarely plays with now as interests diverge and wanting to invite girls like Hadley, Gracie, and Emma whose friendship was so exciting to him last year but may well have run their course. He doesn't see Hadley very much at all, it seems, and while Gracie and Emma are in the adjacent classroom and join his class on occasion for special activities, I'm not sure how strong the relationships remain. At first he really resisted cutting the girls from the list, but later seemed OK with it.


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