This has been the first week when this blog was in true peril of just not happening. Work has consumed me like never before. Throw in a few kids’ classes and dentist appointments and soon you’re eating dark chocolate alone at 2a.m., simultaneously sending emails, watching Gray’s Anatomy, and sleeping sitting up.
These are the nights when I long for candy corn.
Once, when I was young and staying up until 2 meant sleeping until 11, I didn’t get it when people would refer to life as just spins on a hamster wheel. Now I do.
My life is a series of repetitions and, with a five year old boy, one of the basic truths of my weekends is that on any given Sunday there will be a birthday party. The theme, location, kids may be different but we will be there, Danny off and running before we get through the door, Annie draped around my knee until she gets some sugar going and makes some new little “girlfriends,” and Jay wandering around trying to eat bits of balloons or plastic forks. Dan will likely be there too, off in the men’s enclave discussing work and sports between turns changing dirty diapers and holding squirmy siblings.
To many, the kids’ birthday party is the bane of their existence. It’s a time suck. It’s too much sugar, too many little plastic toys that will clutter up the playroom or break in the car. It’s the promise of a balloon lost on the way to the parking lot or, worse yet, floating around your house for the next week, limp and smeared with chocolate yet inexplicably a favorite toy. (Until Mommy remembers to get the scissors out post-bedtime.)
But I have to admit it, I love the parties. I don’t mind the sugar or even the plastic toys. (Although I am anti-balloon as I just can’t take the inevitable heartbreak.)
I partially love the parties because they represent the one and only time in my week when I get to sit down, eat a piece of cake, and let someone else sweep under the table.
I also love the parties because I get to see my friends. When Danny was only a few months old, I joined a playgroup for him through our local mothers club. Although now it seems a bit hysterical to think back on all the museums and parks that we’d drag our tiny babies to, this groups of moms—initially brought together solely by our self-identification as working moms with kids of a certain age—have become dear friends. And even though our Saturdays are now too filled with T-ball and tap to even think about bringing the most recent crop of babies to the zoo, we do still get to hang out at all those birthday parties. We swap stories, have some laughs and pull out our calendars to get a night out on the books. Just think, without these parties, we might never get a chance to organize our own adult fun.
But the fact is that I simply love kids’ parties. And yes I maybe go a bit too far on my kids’ celebrations. I love the entertainers. I love the fancy cakes. I love planning the goodie bags. I have even been known to love a piñata. I buy dishes and decorations online. I get birthday T-shirts. I plan a menu. In the past five years, we’ve done music classes, magic, puppets, science experiments, princesses and pirates, and one ill-planned big bear which scared off most of the kids at Danny’s first birthday party. So, yes, I go a bit overboard, as perhaps only a mom whose own birthday is the day after Christmas can go.
My husband is constantly asking me to scale it down. No more printed invitations, no more entertainers. But I just can’t help myself. For me, planning the parties is a bit of time off of that gerbil wheel (or perhaps just a turn on a different setting). It’s a chance to plan something fanciful, something that makes people smile, something that the kids will someday remember. Just like I remember the year my mom’s friend made me a princess birthday cake, with a real Barbie doll as the body and graceful cascades of delicate pink frosting decorating her delicious chocolate dress.
And let’s face it, before you know it, my kids will be tweens and birthdays will involve sleep-overs and nights out at the movies with their own friends. There is so little time when seeing Cinderella at the door is going to make Annie almost faint with excitement, where Danny will start planning in March the theme for his party in September, or where Jay will want to hold my hand and shake a maraca as we sit in a circle at the park on a sunny spring day.
I’ll do my rounds at the computer, my rotations of classes on ExerciseTV, but give me my spin of the birthdays too. Let me sit and enjoy a friend’s story of how she too lost it on her kids this week because her three year old had an accident at the same time that her boss called her with a crisis. Let me watch as Annie untangles herself from my legs and skips away, holding a big girl’s welcoming hand. Let me see Danny work with his buddies to build a volcano and then run like the wind when the sucker blows. And let me hold my littlest love in my arms, a birthday crown on his fuzzy, still baby-warm head, as we celebrate his birthday with the promise of a first taste of sweet frosting, and many more to come.
With age I have learned something important about this crazy wheel after all. There simply are some things that are worth repeating.