As the day of Rachael’s second birthday rounded the corner, Jeff and I began to get excited about the prospects of giving our girl a party. Last year, despite my objections, Jeff insisted on throwing a bash to celebrate the anniversary of her first day of life. This year, I knew the party would be far better, because she actually might remember it.
I began inviting friends with kids and before I knew it, the list of possible children attending was over 30. What can I say, a good percentage of my friends with kids are Orthodox, and they like big families. Thankfully, as the day approached, the number of children in attendance had whittled its way down to the late teens.
I set the birthday bash for 2:00 PM, and by 2:30 PM only two of my friends had shown up. I was beginning to think that my daughter’s birthday was going to wind up like that scene from Bette Middler’s movie, Stella, where no one comes to Jenny’s party, because her mom is weird and kind of slutty and they are poor. Fortunately, it was just a case of living on JST (Jewish Standard Time). Jews, for some unknown reason, are habitually late. They always do great and diligent work and are the life of the party once they arrive, but making it to something on time is one battle that will never be won.
The children arrived with their parents in herds and instantly took to the inflatable jump house. Earlier this year, we realized that a formal living room was an enormous waste of space, and sold all of the furniture to make way for a new office. Unfortunately, we still haven’t found office furniture we like, so the room remains bare leaving us fodder for neighborhood rumors that a divorce may be pending. Today the empty room came in handy as kids jumped, yelled, threw colored balls at each other, and ran around like a pack of wild monkeys on speed.
The chaos progressed from the inflatable jump house to Rachael’s playroom and spilled over to the family room where we parents were attempting to be inconspicuous and have a conversation that didn’t contain the words, “put that down”, “don’t touch” and “because I said so.”
Since I’ve planned every kind of get together imaginable, including and not limited to, bachelor parties, frat gatherings, backstage meet ‘n’ greets, and the “night off” party for the Up In Smoke Tour back in 2000, I decided to do the simplest itinerary: letting the kids run the party. The two oldest girls who were all of seven-years-old took charge. They provided valuable leadership telling the adults when it was appropriate to open presents, cut the cake, and break the piñata. They were both bossy, determined, and in their position of power showed more hunger than George W. staring at an oil well in Iraq. Normally, I’d worry about such behavior in girls, so young, but in their coup over the adults, they were also taking care of the little kids. Yes, we were dealing with pint-sized tyrants, but we were getting a much needed break from our kids, so ‘viva la Ninas!’
The piñata, shaped like a kneeling Dora, was fun. You never know how much aggression a three-year-old has until you hand him a broom handle and put him in front of a paper Mache figurine filled with candy. These kids were fierce! The little ones didn’t want to quit hitting Dora and the older ones were going for broke with their three turns. In the end, the little Explorer held her own, and we had to pull the weenie string on the bottom to get the candy to release. Jeff spent the next few minutes wondering how hard it would be to bang the dent out of Dora’s head, so we could use the piñata for next year’s party.
Rachael opened her presents, with help from several of her friends, and then we were ordered to do the cake. In order to accommodate our kosher friends, we got a kosher cake. It looks just like a regular one, but it doesn’t contain any dairy products. It also costs twice as much, as Jeff reminded me when he brought it home.
The nice thing about having kosher friends is that everything has to be disposable, which is a great benefit at the end of the night when paper plates full of half-eaten pieces of cake and pools of melted ice cream are everywhere. I folded the paper table covering over all of it and tossed it in the trash, along with random pieces of half-eaten piñata candy I found around the house.It was over, the house was clean, and Rachael’s second birthday was successfully caught on DVD by the amateur Copolla working on the video editing software upstairs. I kicked back with a shot of rum, and the joy of knowing that I wouldn’t have to do this again for at least another 365 days.
No comments:
Post a Comment