I am surfacing briefly, gulping some air before diving back down into the miserable, murky sea of finals week, in order to bring my eldest son’s adoring fans a few pictures from his now long-past birthday party.
It was, you will soon gather, not without roadblocks. We had rented a pavilion at this lovely park in order to avoid bringing children (and, let’s be honest, their parents) to our filthy house full of boxes and devoid of any decorative elements (long since packed). Also, our house is little, and we invited a fair number of people to this gig.* The pavilion at the park was right near some awesome playground equipment, a little shallow stream, a few gentle and short (.1 miles) hikes – the perfect place for a bunch of four year olds to run wild. No activity-planning or craft projects would be required. We would grill out. Easy peasy. I made this awesome cake the night before.
Ha ha! Just kidding. (That cake was made by a Kansas baker named Christi, go check her out if you’re a cake-o-phile!) The cake I actually made was this one:
On Thursday we started getting a little worried about our party, because this was Saturday’s forecast:
Mostly cloudy. Scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms in the morning, then scattered showers in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 40 percent.
We could not move the party to the local indoor bouncy place, because (a) Jack has always been terrified of bouncy places, and has only moderately outgrown this terror, and (b) another kid from Jack’s class was having a bouncy place party the next day, and we would totally steal that kid’s thunder. Also, they were all rapidly being booked by the other parents in our situation. We couldn’t even delay the party, because yet a third kid in Jack’s class was having HIS birthday party at 2 that same day. (RIDICULOUS, the amount of Hot Wheels cars I purchased in April.) We spent Thursday and Friday crossing our fingers.
We woke on Saturday to a slightly overcast but dry morning, the perfect temperature. Our 10am start time meant we had to decide by 8am whether we’d move it inside or not. We derived much too much hope from the look of the sky, and the terms “scattered” and “isolated” in the forecast, and sent an email to our guests that the party was on. We began the twenty minute drive to the park. Two minutes later, the skies opened up. We chanted our “isolated, scattered. isolated, scattered” mantra and kept driving, hoping it would clear up by 11 or so.
After unloading the car in the pouring rain, setting up decorations in the pouring rain, allowing the children to essentially writhe in mud puddles in the pouring rain, protecting the glorious cake from the splash of the pouring rain, watching the genial and safe little stream turn into a roaring raging river in the pouring rain, and receiving a number of texts asking about the pouring rain – we sighed deep sighs, shook our fists at the sky, and told everybody to give us an hour and meet us at our house.
So, the party was at our house. And it went ok.
He had a blast. He truly did. And we served Cane’s chicken fingers, a delicious green salad and a delicious fruit salad, and beer, so I think the adults enjoyed themselves as well. I count it a success, though I wish we’d skipped the round-trip drives over the Mississippi and just deemed it an indoor party from the start. Ah well: you live, you learn.
Jack’s actual birthday was the following Wednesday, and he and I spent it together. We had Jack’s favorite lunch at “the pizza shop.”
Played at the park.
Ate ice cream at the “ice cream shop.”
And entertained calls from his adoring fans.
All in all, I think we celebrated the young man’s fourth birthday just perfectly.
*including some childless friends. This was our first “Friend Party” – in the past we’ve just thrown parties for ourselves, invited our own friends, and called it a party in Jack’s honor. This year was a kind of hybrid – Jack’s friends and ours. And it was a mistake, I’m thinking – you gotta go one way or the other with these things. The childless people feel sort of foolish, and the adults you don’t know (parents of your kid’s classmates) kind of mess with the “this is an adult party” vibe. It wasn’t unmitigated disaster, just a little weird. Lesson learned.