The sun gently peeks through our morning window, nudging me out of my cozy blankets and toward my coffee machine already beginning its preset drip. I hear a bird sing. Gradually, an eerie, foreshadowing soundtrack begins to rise.
Egads! Someone has ransacked my living room! Wait! No! Earthquake? Santa’s elves paid a late visit? Oh right, we had a birthday party yesterday for our six-year-old. That’s why my body hurts. My baking marathon and kindergarten wrangling has taken its toll.
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? At the risk of sounding like my mom, back in my day, we pinned the tail on the donkey, ate a piece of cake and got a balloon to take home if we were lucky. Now, you need a bounce house, a piñata, pizzas, prizes, color-coordinated decorations, face painting, an open bar for the parents and Oscar-like swag bags to be given as parting gifts.
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Each year we have to decide whether to contribute to the college fund or have a birthday party. And after we’ve made the wrong choice, we are then faced with days of planning, shopping, cooking—followed by cleaning up and sorting the loot. As I write this, I am contracting to build an extra wing onto the house to store the toys and gifts that are busting our little cottage at the seams.
This is my advice to young parents about birthday parties: Start small! It’s hard to downsize once the kids develop a taste for champagne juice boxes, truckloads of toys and personal visits from Cinderella. I think parents get so excited about surviving the first year of parenthood that they freak out and invite every person they’ve ever met and provide every single service and entertainment they’ve read about in parenting magazines.
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We forget that we have at least 17 more years to outdo ourselves. Or, was that just me? Year one should be two of your best friends and maybe the grandparents, one cake and an empty box, beautifully wrapped, as a gift. By the third birthday you can work up to , eight of your closest friends, cake and pizza, and some blocks. By kindergarten or 1st grade, check out Jack’s Gym with 10-12 friends, cake, pizza, and goldfish.
A strange thing happens when children turns six. Suddenly they want to invite their friends to their party instead of my friends. What? I’m not ready for this independent thinking. Our daughter, who has a remarkable memory, wanted to invite everyone she has ever met, which was about 43 children and five special adults, including a waitress who gave her a free soda refill once. My son, only had about four on his list, two of whose names he didn’t remember.
“Mom, did you invite Calvin?” asks my sweet boy.
“Who’s Calvin?” I respond.
“He wears skinny jeans and is in the Yellow class at school.”
“Yellow Class? Is that the one next door to your classroom?”
“I don’t know. Please invite him. He’s my new friend.”
Hmmm. This is another moment you don’t foresee when basking in pregnancy. That you will have to socialize with people you don’t know—just because your kids jump rope together.
Partly because of our ridiculously large guest list, we decided to have the party at our house and recruit the services of —where we got a great deal on a bounce house and their secret rain dance instructions to forswear the rain.
The whole delightful, gluttony of this festival of birthing reminded me of a conversation with my dear ol’ grandfather. I once asked him what kind of toys he played with when he was a boy. He paused for a few beats and then smiled. “I remember there was this stick. I called it Me Stick.” He smiled fondly. “Yes, that was a fun stick.”
Thunderstruck, I tried to fathom the vast differences between his simple Tom Sawyer childhood and the Star Wars/Pink Pony plastic-filled electronic existence my children inhabit.
My grandfather was no hillbilly (not that there's anything wrong with the subjects of that particular pop-culture department). His parents had fine china (which is now in my cupboard as evidence) a car, an accordion and some land. He went to university, became an engineer, president of the local school board, a respected member of his community, wonderful husband and a crackerjack crossword puzzler.
It’s impossible to draw the exact cause and effect line of a person’s achievements. To improve our odds, however, I have decided to allow the kids’ collection of rocks, pine cones and Me Sticks to gather at our backdoor. I think one day it will pay off.
