Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who helped with and attended my daughter's birthday party. You all made it quite memorable for her and she is still talking about it, so thank you for helping to make my daughter's day special.
Secondly...
I have fond
memories of my birthday parties from when I was young. I remember having my
friends come over, having some cake, playing with everyone and being slightly
disappointed with the presents that I got.
As a child, I thought a birthday party was a fun, stress free time when
my family and friends could get together and have a blast. I have seen it from the other side now and my
life will never be the same.
My daughter’s
second birthday came and went like a plague of locusts tearing through my house,
devouring and laying waste to my humble abode. Her birthday was actually on a
Sunday, but the festivities started on Friday at daycare as they celebrated by
pumping her full of carrot cake, which might as well be jet fuel to a two year
old. As we had planned her party for Saturday afternoon, my wife and I, along
with two of our dear friends, decided to decorate on Friday night after our
daughter went to bed. The carrot cake induced nuclear reaction that happened
that evening is too exhausting to put into words, but if you’re the slightest
bit familiar with my daughter or any of the adventures that I have previously
chronicled, you can imagine the screaming fit of hyperactive rage and attitude
that exploded when it was time for night-night. The fight culminated after she
was in bed with her throwing her blanket out of her crib in protest and
screaming at the top of her lungs, “MYYY BWWWWWANNNKETTTTT!!! I WANT MY
BWWWANKET BACK!!!!” So, after a few rounds of fetch the
bwanket, she and I had to come to the understanding that if her blanket made it
out of her crib again, it would stay where it lay and she would be a
bwanket-less girl that night. It was a shaky truce, but the adults were able to
continue our decorating for the upcoming festivities.
My wife had
decided that an “Under the Sea” theme would be best for our daughter’s party,
and in my simple, simple mind I envisioned popping The Little Mermaid into the
DVD player and getting some paper cutouts of Ariel and her fishy little friends
and hanging them from the ceiling or something to that cheesy and clearly
unimaginative effect. I, of course, was laughed at and ridiculed for having
such a poor perception of how a child birthday should REALLY be. I was shown
the light when my wife and her friend spent week after week in preparation by
building all of the decorations by hand, which included a four foot tall
mermaid made of poster board that was fastened to the wall amongst equally
homemade poster board bubbles and seaweed. Not to mention the seven or eight
giant jellyfish made from paper bowls, ribbon and giant googly eyes. Then there
was the school of a dozen inflatable fish that were hung from the ceiling. And
the blue and green filtered lights reflecting off of the portable disco ball to
give the room a shimmery ambiance.
After working
well into the night to transform our living room into an underwater lair,
naturally as we awoke the next morning and made our way back into our new
aquarium living room, everything we had taped to the ceiling in an exhausted
haste the night before was laying on the floor as if the birthday party
gremlins had paid a visit (I’ll never buy cheap tape again). My daughter,
seeing the newly transformed and dilapidated underwater living room ran
screaming, “MY FISHEEEEEEEES” toward the pile of inflated fish that now looked
like they had been tossed out by some cartoon fishmonger. Then it was time to redecorate, get the food
ready, wrap the presents and be all ready to go by just after lunch.
The thought of having
this birthday party in my living room brought to mind visions of an alliance of
toddlers banding together to squelch the tyrannical rule of the adults by any
means necessary, and the more violent the better. It didn't turn out much
differently than I had imagined. Children
everywhere…screaming…running…throwing…total and absolute chaos exploded at a
soprano pitch in my living room. Food and drinks were splayed out like the
aftermath of a tornado at an unfortunate state fair. Children love cheese.
Children aren't very good at holding on to their food and have a general
disregard for putting things where they go. I had put out little, tiny sandwich
fixings as hors d’oeuvres for the adults and as actual food for the kids which
meant kids were grabbing cheese by the handful, taking a few bites and then
tossing the leftovers with reckless abandon and letting the remains lie
wherever they happened to land, which was generally very close to their feet.
Those feet then stomped and ground the saliva soaked half eaten cheese into the
living room rug, the kitchen floor, the top of my ottoman, or it was smeared
across the glass doors of the fireplace. The adults drink cups were routinely
swatted off of whatever surface upon which they had been perched. It was almost
like some sadistic childhood game where the adults had not been given a copy of
the rules, they had just been dropped into the middle of knee-high mayhem and
expected to survive. I don’t normally fare well in those types of situations,
so I was running around like some kind of butler at an insane asylum trying to
scrape soggy cheese mash out of my rug and cleaning up spilled drinks and
crushed juice boxes the moment they hit the floor, all while humming the theme
to “Doctor Who” to myself in an attempt to keep the raucous cacophony from the
party horde from splitting my mind in two. Decorations were being pulled down
and destroyed, inflatable, plastic fish were apparently dying from the shock of
it all and were falling from the ceiling like flies and bouncing off of little
kids’ heads, which of course lead the children to then pick up the deceased sea
life and pummel each other about the head. This went on for three solid hours.
It’s been nearly
a week since the tiniest apocalypse unfolded in my home. There are still the
remains of undersea decorations sticking to my wall, and a four foot tall
poster board mermaid still lays trampled and broken in the corner by the
fireplace like the sole, unclaimed soldier whose remains decorate the
battlefield. My wife and I are still exhausted. Our daughter thinks it was the
best day of her life.
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