We're in that time of the year, early summer, when our kids have their birthdays. The darkest of times. The tragedy of the weeks surrounding Two of Two's birthday, which was on Monday, are exacerbated by the fact that just about every kid in his class seems to have their birthday in the same month. Birthday parties round every corner. It's like some biblical plague, as a quick look at the Old Testament confirms:
Samuel 5:9 And it was so, that, after they had carried it about, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction; and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and declared that every first-born child would have a birthday EVERY DAY. And the Philistines declared, 'All right, enough already, take the stupid Ark back, we don't want it!'
I hate the kids' birthdays.
I don't mind them starting to ask for stuff as soon as they've ripped open their Christmas presents. I don't mind spending money. I don't mind buying them pointless pieces of crap, if they really really want a particular pointless piece of crap. And I'm quite happy to make a cake. What crawls under my skin like a malignant, creeping infestation, is the fact that they always want to include their friends in what they do. They want a party.
I start to get stressed about the birthday thing some time in April, at about the point when I realise that it's already too late to book a decent entertainer or party venue. I then spend the rest of the time leading up to their birthdays, offering them ANYTHING instead of having a party. Anything.
Me: You can have a year at Disneyland Florida with all the Coke and cheeseburgers you can eat.
Two of Two: Great, Dad! Can everyone else in my class come?
We almost succumbed to the party this year, even going along to the de rigueur party venue of the moment to establish if they had a free day. We discovered that they forced you to let them supply the food at fantastical rip-off prices, and if you wanted to make your own cake, you had to pay them for the privilege of bringing your own. YOU had to pay THEM if you made a cake... There's capitalism for you. We felt kind of bad, because obviously there are plenty of parents at the school who put up with this kind of diktat, but we told the wee man that the Party Venue was about to be sold to the Polish government and turned into a high security detention centre for suspected liberals, and that we'd have to come up with a plan Y.
Plan Y: We'd buy him a Nintendo DS, (so far we have steered well clear of the whole Nintendo/Playstation thing, instead buying presents that make him use his imagination or run about in the garden), and take him and a couple of friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
He jumped at Plan Y. In fact, we had him at the Nintendo, but thought we should at least have something involving his mates. Sadly, being a pair of complete suckers, by last Friday, the trip to the cinema with two wee friends to see Pirates 3 had become a trip with four of his friends to the cinema, followed by a mass sleepover at our place.
Anything to avoid an actual party situation.
The potential for disaster in taking five seven year-old children to see a 12-rated movie that lasts somewhere in the region of eight hours seemed huge, and the stress of that replaced the stress that had been removed by coming up with a party alternative.
And so, last Friday evening, TPCKAM and I crammed five wee boys into the car and headed off for the local shopping mall. (One of Two had sensibly gone to see her friends in New Zealand for the evening to get as far away from Dodge as possible.) On the face of it the odds don't sound too bad. Two adults, five kids. Two and a half kids each. There are plenty of parents who go out on their own with more than two and a half kids, there are teachers who take out groups of kids by the dozen, with only an underpaid classroom assistant for help.
The thing that makes it difficult in this situation is that out of the five kids, you have authority over one of them. The other four couldn't give a stuff who you are. You're just some boring parent. You are powerless, and entirely dependant on them selecting good behaviour as a lifestyle choice for the evening. The secret is to not let them know just how much power they have.
So, we pitched up at McDonald's fully expecting the entire thing to degenerate into a Die Hard-type situation, with Bruce Willis required to rescue all the other shoppers in the mall from this Rat Pack of marauding children.
Dinner - if you can call McDonald's dinner - passed uneventfully. We proceeded to the cinema and plied them with more junk food. The film eventually started and, with the exception of having to provide a bag of sweets somewhere in the middle to help them get through some of the love angst scenes, we made it to the end intact.
(We showed the wee man a picture of the Rolling Stones a couple of days later and said, that's Jack's dad from the movie, and he said, 'So he wasn't wearing make-up then?')
Having had the parental super-genius thought to buy them each a Pirates toy to play with when they got home, they happily gamboled around the house, with barely a passing glance at the carefully constructed and decorated birthday cake, finally settling down at around quarter to midnight. At the time I wondered if this was a ruse, whereby they all laid low for a few minutes to make us think they'd gone to sleep. However, they consequently proved at 0437hrs the following morning their complete inability to pretend to be quiet.
They charged into our bedroom en masse, asking if they could go and play in the back garden. At twenty-three minutes before five on a Saturday morning. We turned the tv on and manacled them to the sofa. At 0553hrs they decided to creep outside in an illicit, covert operation, intent on playing football in a surreptitious manner, a game cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge. By the time I got downstairs - around 0715hrs - they were back inside, and pretending that they'd been watching tv the whole time. It was as if nothing had happened. And if they hadn't spent forty minutes outside screaming their heads off, charging round the garden like hordes of Visigoths laying waste the armies of Rome, so that at 0612hrs the Polish Ministry of Defence declared a state of emergency, announcing that the capital was under attack by unnamed foreign forces, we might never have known they'd crossed the door.
The sleepover raced along, full-speed, to its conclusion. To be honest, when we have other people's kids over to stay I'm not that bothered if they enjoy themselves, it being of secondary importance to them NOT ENDING UP IN HOSPITAL. When the parents pitch up at the door to collect their kids, it's vital that you can hand the kid back by the scruff of the neck, unharmed. Anything else is a bonus. I'm not one to think, 'Well, your son's paralysed from the neck down, but at least he really enjoyed the movie...'
By 0930hrs on Saturday morning it was all over. The lad got his Nintendo, he'd seen the movie, he'd had four mates stay the night, none of them broke a leg... Part One of The Annual Apocalyptic Birthday Stress Disaster is over.
One down, one to go. Now we just have to deal with One of Two's expectation that she's having eight nine year-old girl's here for a sleepover at the beginning of July...
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