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Our second party this last Friday was Zelda and Sofia’s joint celebration of birth, commemorated with the Hello Kitty and Pucca cakes that are pictured here.

Zelda’s portion of Party Friday began with a race across town from the wedding reception to a panadería to pick up the crustless (and tasteless, truth be told) miga sandwiches and the masa seca (shortbread cookies with chocolate, dulce de leche and fruit fillings). In the same cab, we left the bakery and drove toward the apartment, where the Zs and I disembarked. Tom continued on from there to the party room, where he dropped off the food and ran to the nearest Chino to get ten, 2 liter bottles of various sodas.

Meanwhile, at the apartment, I was having the girls change (Zelda into her Chinese dress, and Zoe into her more casual clothes), gathering together gift bags, gifts, receipts, money to pay for the festivities, and extras in case I needed to build more gift bags while I was at the party. We had to solve the crisis of Zelda’s underwear showing through her tights as the slits on the side of the dress ran a little high…apparently they don’t make them with sitting “criss cross apple sauce” in mind!

So, with a zillion tons of crap, the Zs and I tromped downstairs and headed for the salon de fiestas in a taxi during rush hour.

The salon was divided into two major rooms — one ostensibly for adults, and one for kids, the latter being the location for the birthday emcees, who had set up with their audio/visual equipment by the time I had arrived.

You can see the kids’ area in the first photo below, when it was still neat and the children were snorfing snacks while waiting for things to get going. By the time all of the munchkins arrived, it was a booming room with a master of ceremonies, multimedia quizzes, and dancing — the birthday entertainment industry is big business here and these guys occupy the little ones for about 2 1/2 hours.

You can see how rapt some of the attendees were in the 2nd photo below. The third shot captures Zelda’s momentary pause to pop something in her mouth!

The second row of images below are some of the party shots the birthday entertainers provided from the event. Both Zelda and Sofia were delighted with these cheesy visuals!

Lest you think everything went well, we did have a few mishaps. Something blew the circuit breaker and there was no lighting for much of the party (making photography difficult). Strangely (thank God, really), there was still enough juice to power the audio/visual though. The other monkey wrench was a student still waiting for their parents thirty minutes after the scheduled end of the party, and we had no way to reach said parents. It all ended happily; however, the mother arrived after some last minute gift shopping, and picked up her daughter!

And lastly, I have to make a small mention about our gift bags. I must say, they were awesome! We went to Chinatown and bought a bunch of crap. Why is that so awesome? Because we purchased different crap than the usual party bag goodies that everyone buys from the usual stores.

Of course, I couldn’t stop myself from negotiating. I always asked the Chinese vendors for a discount since we were buying 16 items at a whack. I figured they let me get away with it because I was speaking my rather rusty Mandarin. At one point, after a small purchase, Tom asked me, “you know you were negotiating over .60 cents there honey?”

I didn’t really get his question!

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