This Post is Three Days Late

He turned one.  It was terribly sad.

Until it wasn’t.

We had a few gifts, a few party hats, a few cupcakes.

I had bought Liam three small gifts from a trip to the Aquarium earlier in the summer – no big deal, bought as afterthoughts, but as it turned out the only stuff I managed to purchase and wrap before his big day.  (Luckily, his Aunt had sent along a whole box of wrapped gifts, so we had a few more things to open than just a tacky Aquarium t-shirt and a couple of board books about penguins.)*  In an attempt to atone for this horrific, non-consumer mothering, I purchased a pack of ten party hats and ten party blowers (not the noisemaking kind – my momma didn’t raise no dummy).  Liam adored gnawing on the blowers, and the hats thrilled Jack for several days afterwards, until I managed to surreptitiously throw most of them away, one at a time.

I also purchased six neon pink cupcakes with plastic picks in them in the shape of flip flops and sunglasses and suns.  The frosting was very bright, and copious.

Apparently, this crappy hotel internet connection has hit its quota on the number of photos it will allow me to upload.  So that’s all the photos you get.  Instead of relying on images, I will have to use words to describe the shocking pinkness of the cupcakes, Liam’s skepticism upon the placement of his Special Birthday Cupcake in front of him on the dirty picnic table, his brief taste and rejection, his pleasure in rubbing the frosting between his hands, his thoughtful gaze in my direction, his slow, deliberate smack of a tiny be-fronsting’d hand right onto my cheek and hair.  (My despair upon realizing I had brought no wipes or napkins with us to the picnic area.)

The mosquitoes quickly chased us from our picnic table, and we went home to the hotel and bathed the kids and put them to bed, and ourselves too even though it was just 8:00, because what else can we do – sit there in the room in the dark?  Go hang out in the bathroom?  Fill the tub with pillows and try to read or watch a DVD on the laptop?  (That actually would have been a good idea.)  That evening I sang Liam the birthday song as his lullaby, and we got several calls from family, most of which we had to ignore because we were wrestling two very pink children into the bathtub.  The next morning I got up and went to work, and Liam continued to stubbornly not walk, even though he’s one now, heaven’s sake, let’s get this thing going.***

His celebration was a small blip on an otherwise intensely busy work week, but our failure to mark his big day with custom name banners or a special birthday outfit or a lovingly made cake (sniff, that did make me feel bad) is not, I REPEAT, FUTURE LIAM WHO MAY BE READING THIS, NOT a reflection of my love for this adventurous, mischievous, whipsmart, stubborn little delight of a boy – it is merely the reflection of our gypsy summer, our nomadic circumstances on this June fifteenth of two thousand eleven.  He’s the little brown eyed apple of my little brown eye.  The older he gets, the more fun he is, and maybe I’ll make up for his crappy first birthday by giving him one heckuva bash when he hits two.

(Except then I’ll be studying for the bar.)

(Perhaps, for convenience, I’ll just temporarily change his birthday to some time in October.)

*I’m aware, in case you were planning on informing me, that he is only one and he’ll never remember this birthday and it’s no big deal and he doesn’t know the difference and the first birthday is just for the parents anyway.  Notice how he had a crappy nothing special birthday “party” on a dirty, splintery picnic table in a subdivision across the street from our hotel and he had no gifts and we had no decorations AND YET I can go on.  I’d have liked to have done something more, but we did what we could manage.**

**I’ll have you know I spent many a birthday of my own at a picnic table in some new city, since the Navy always moved us on or around my birthday, and I’ve grown up to be a wonderfully well adjusted girl, so I know Liam will be just fine.

***Liam can walk, he has all the coordination, muscle strength, balance, and motor skills.  He just chooses instead to stand there and cry when we stand him up across the room and call him to us.  Or, in the alternative, he will lower himself expertly to a crawl and drag himself across the floor to us, giggling all the way.  I suppose I shouldn’t be in a hurry for him to be running around.  However, he is mobile anyway, what with the fast crawling, and at least if he was vertical I wouldn’t have to scrub stains off the tummies of all of his onesies.