Currently 23 inches high. It was 3 tiny stems 3 months ago. They do exceptionally well with grow lights. Experimenting with different LED spectrums I found that red and white promote fast growth, thick stems and branching between leaf stems. Purple lighting promotes compact growth and large deep green leaves.

Ugh! I lost the long reply I had to everyone. Don't have time to re-write right now but thanks to the ideas you offered up, I've decided on a theme (Team Umizoomi - my boy/girl twins love them!) and will incorporate their circle/shapes/numbers theme into a few of the games that were suggested - particularly the obstacle course. christina_ca - I am planning on an "adopt-a-puppy" (play) theme next year for their 4th. A friend suggested it & did it for her daughter. She said it was such a fun time. She collected stuffed puppies on sale/clearance in the months before the party. On the day of the party, she had each child go with her into another room so they could select their puppy privately and then each child went to different "stations" - check up by the vet (her DH is a doctor so he was in white coat with his basic dr kit), pretend bath & grooming station, puppy treats station and receive official adoption certificate station. That was enough activity apparently and it worked perfectly for everyone to have their puppies and go into ice cream & cake. My goal now is to use the theme but remember what I wanted in the first place: an old-fashioned backyard birthday party. Having the theme puts everything into focus for me now - I didn't think to have a theme until y'all mentioned it. Again, thanks for all the ideas.

meghane, as a conflict-resolution specialist I knew used to say, "there's a lot of fear." That's what I ascribe the neutrality cult to be about. HGTV "it'll never sell" "it's personal to the owner" "it's you"...now *sometimes*, unfortunately, one person's color choice is not another person's taste, and it costs money to change out non-moveable elements like counters and backsplashes as opposed to pillows and lampshades etc., so it really is safer, if safe investment is your primary goal. That said, if y'all saw my house you'd know I'm not averse to color...The Hallarum cabinets with green-tea-Corian (with pencil edges -- it actually looks good, folks, don't choke!) with the Sicis waterglass backsplash in two shades of gold, deeper reddish brown, and two shades of green/gray, would prove it :) I love it so much that I hate to think that someone else won't, but what I did with the backsplash was to screw the backerboard in on top of the drywall and put tiles over the screws, so that if someone really hates it, I can just take it off and reuse the tiles in my new house. They can have plain painted drywall or tumbled travertine if they want :) They're stuck with the corian, though, but it is such a wonderful neutral green-gray, like concrete almost, that another backsplash would be easy to choose to coordinate with, IMO.

Has anyone tried the books by Elisabeth Ogilvie? She was active from the middle through the close of the 20th century. Her books were mostly set in rural coastal Maine, a series about Bennett's Island as well as some stand alone novels, suspense stories, and historical novels. I believe there were some YA books as well, though I never read any of those. I wasn't crazy about the Bennett's Island series, though they were very popular, but I liked some of her other adult novels very much. She was a master at evoking a sense of place. In fact, she made me long to visit Maine.