A and K are both May babies, so we’ve been busy baking cakes and wrapping presents. K turned 2 last week and we had a fairly quiet evening, while A turns 4 on Saturday.

Saturday was anything but quiet as we hosted a birthday party for both the boys. A room of 14 children under the age of 5 is already fairly noisy, but when you add Mike from Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo and his menagerie of creepy crawlies, the energy level goes through the roof.

It was actually a pretty cool party. Mike brought a tarantula, a huge millipede, some lizards, a cane toad, two snakes, and a snapping turtle. I was O.K. with it for the most part, although I was a little worried that the turtle might take a kid’s finger off. I also had images of kids licking the cane toad and then rolling around on the floor having hallucinations.

For some reason, the thought of a bunch of adults coming to our house turned me into a Martha Stewart wannabe. Suddenly the front door needed to be painted, photos had to be framed and hung, the piano polished, windows washed. Of course, hours of cleaning were quickly undone as kids ground chocolate cake into the carpet, but at least the place was presentable for the first few guests.