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The BatPup got it into her head that she wanted to go to "a Evil Feast", which we took to mean a medieval one. (If we were wrong and she really wanted to have dinner with Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe and Dick Cheney, well... dang.) So we went along to the Baronial Day and the Pot Luck Feast yesterday, with... mixed results.

Initially, it was highly painful. The Elder Daughter of DOOOM was particularly DOOOMy, having just returned from two weeks in the bucolic hamlet of Lower Lumbago with my parents, during which time she was doted upon in a typically grandparently fashion so that by the time she returned it was clear that she was the Entitlement Consort to the winner of the Entitlement Crown Tourney, had been declared Entitlement Crown Princess and was looking forward to her Entitlement Coronation any moment now. But a quick trip to a bakery for breadular comestibles helped all three of us get our heads together, and things improved dramatically after that.

Over the course of the evening, I found a good balance between using the EDoD as a babysitter and simply letting her swan off doing her own thing. She was happy with the mix too, and in the end spent plenty more time than I expected looking after the BatPup as well as Master Pertand Handsome's^[1] two gorgeous daughters. This enabled me to get something to eat and spend some time chatting with people. I tried to convince the monkeys to eat as well, but not even bread and roast chook caught their attention. Fortunately, the bakery trip and a bit of yoghurt kept them from collapse.

I now have the stirrings of a plan for a future Evil Feast Kit: supplies to enable more relaxed feast-and-tourney attendance with my manic monkeys:

Food Stuff

Yoghurts, which both daughters seem to like and be willing to eat even when there's fun to be had

Orange juice

Cheese

Bread

Butter for bread

A bread knife!

Base Camp Materials

Picnic rugs

Face wipes

Spare underthings for the BatPup, who is well on the way to toilet-trainedness give or take some occasional accidents

A groundsheet for sleeping on

A BatPup-sized blanket -- she can quite happily sleep just about anywhere that's dark and not too cold, regardless of noise

Really, that's about it. The monkeys can get sufficient nourishment even if the feast itself is not to their liking, and if the BatPup wants to go to sleep the groundsheet and a blankie will do nicely.

Time to update the feasting kit, methinks...

[1] Names changed to protect the guilty, although not very much.