The boy turned five recently. The theme of the party (since all kids parties need to be "themed", apparently) was supposed to be a Star Wars sort of thing but Legos got wrapped up in there somehow and also it was at a pool. Oh, yeah, the piñata was a T-Rex, assuming T-Rexes ran around dressed like flamenco dancers.
C'mon folks, get it together here... You're all over the map.
The piñata was a (nearly literally) last minute addition to the festivities. The wife had the idea we could get a soccer ball piñata and paint it like the Death Star or something. Unfortunately, the party store didn't carry what she was looking for so she picked up the T-Rex, which was a decent substitution (like any kid he likes dinosaurs). Since it was the night before the party there was pretty much no way I was going to able to do anything...
With...
It...
Sigh... Even if the idea for painting it to look like a ton-ton or an AT-RT had occurred to me before right this second... Damn it, why didn't I think of that earlier... Doesn't matter, doesn't matter...
Anyway, we didn't even have anything to whack it with. She suggested we could use the boy’s wooden baseball bat. Sure... What could go wrong? Let's blindfold a bunch of clumsy, sugar-high, pool-water wet, sunscreen-slathered three-to-six-year-olds, hand them a heavy, polished piece of lumber and tell them to just go nuts. I suggested if we do go with the bat idea, we should probably bring extra Baggies to the party so that the guests could have something to carry each others' shattered teeth home in.
For you see, kids standing around a piñata know the following things:
- Friends never, ever hit friends. I am safe around friends.
- Once that thing breaks, I will get candy.
- I will get more candy if I get there first, so I need to be one quarter of an inch closer than the person on my left and on my right. This requires vigilance and constant adjustment.
- Every time an adult yells something along the lines of "GET BACK!!", I need to back up two inches per swear word they just used to make them stop yelling, although its not clear why. Don't these stupid grown-ups know #1 above?
The following morning (the day of the party) I dove into my wood supply to see what we could use instead of the Louisville Involuntary Manslaughter-er. I had a six-foot hunk of 1-1/4” oak dowel (um... no) a bunch of one-foot poplar dowels of the same thickness (again, no) and a four-foot poplar 1/2 inch thick piece.
Ahhh... now we’re on to something. I grabbed a chunk of the one-foot poplar dowel and cut a few inches off of it. After that, I bored a 1/2 inch hole down the center a bit, cut the 1/2 inch thick piece down a bit, and slotted it into the thicker piece. After adding some grooves with a Dremmel, a “button” out of some scrap pine, and painting the thing grey and red I had the light saber you see in the pic below. The paint had dried just in time for the party.
We found a convenient overhead branch to tie it to and let the kids have at it, yanking them back out of the Danger Zone when they needed to be. We decided not to blindfold them before they swung because, as the saying goes, “Prudence is the better part of not being sued by outraged parents”.
Before all was said and done, the dowel had broken in two (yikes!) and I was forced to tear the thing in twain and simply dump the candy on the ground. Weak, right? Wrong. The kids couldn’t have cared less - the ends justified the means, in their opinion. Plus now they could get back to swimming, so, like, whatever.
So, the lesson here seems to be if you are ever in need of a piñata (hey, it could happen) just make it yourself. If not, you might find yourself wishing for a real light saber just to put a dent in the sucker.
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