The Man Who Had No Birthdays

Someone’s kid has an extendable arm that only comes out when there’s a chocolate fountain. Handy. 

May Blossom turned six on the weekend and her two requests for her party were:

1. A chocolate fountain
2. No siblings

The first request we could accommodate. We borrowed a device called a Sunbeam Choccy, melted together a kilo of chocolate and a cup of canola oil, and Bob’s your auntie’s live-in lover: there’s your chocolate fountain. Happy days.

The second request was more challenging, because I believe family should celebrate birthdays together. Even if some of the family are behaving like complete shits. I’m a big believer in encouraging children to be kind and loving, and to celebrate each other’s successes and happiness. Garnet’s beliefs are fundamentally opposed to that.

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This Is Your Birthday With Kids

Today it’s H’s and my seventh wedding anniversary. According to some website or other the appropriate gift for seven years of marriage is either made of copper (traditional list) or wool (modern list). I’ve been trying to find a good gift for H. You’d think wouldn’t be that hard since copper is currently very much In Fashion. For a year every catalogue and homewares website I’ve seen has had nothing but bloody copper: clocks, beds, kettles, prismatic vases and picture frames. But do you think I can find one solitary knitted copper jumper? I cannot. And I’ve left it too late to knit my own.

Maybe I’ll just leave it. Last year the suggested gifts were iron and sugar, and H is still a bit grumpy about the bits of toffee that remain stuck to our ironing board.

Today being our anniversary means that two days ago was my birthday. H pulled out all the stops to make it a truly wonderful day. Unfortunately, he was working against the combined forces of birthday ruination, our children, so all his good intentions were for naught.

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Life’s A Treat

Last week Garnet turned three. He’s not a hundred per cent ok with that. The boy has a complicated relationship with the ageing process. He likes being three, but he wants to be a three-year-old baby. In all the games he and his friends play, he must play the baby. The baby pirate. The baby brother in Peter Pan. Baby Cottontail in Peter Rabbit. He’s dipping his toe into the world of superheroes with a character he has invented called – you guessed it – Superbaby. He gets strangely cross when people call him a big boy.

About a month ago he toilet trained, and apart from a small amount of unorthodox backward loo sitting and a misunderstanding about where you are supposed to stand during a standing-up wee (tip: not on the toilet seat) it went off without a hitch. I heaped praise upon him, as you are supposed to, telling him over and over what a good big boy he is now and wow, what a grown-up fellow, gosh. He didn’t respond with ecstatic pride like I expected, instead getting very quiet. After a day or so he finally said, ‘Mummy, can I please not be a big boy? Can I just be a little boy who wears underpants?’ Sure, be a little boy who wears underpants and MAKES HIS MOTHER’S HEART EXPLODE WITH THE CUTENESS. I think the subtext there was also ‘Please could you shut up about my undies and my age and just let a person’s toiletting habits be his own business?’ And of course I can. You know, except for blogging about it, obviously.

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A Very Peter Pan Birthday

The countdown to May Blossom’s fifth birthday has begun. It is agony for the poor child. Six weeks out she started with, ‘It’s a really long time until my birthday. It’s too long. I don’t think I can wait that long.’ Sorry, my love, birthdays come when they come. And if you think this spring is going slowly, you should have been here five years ago, when the months of September and October took eleven years, I weighed the same as the average delivery of topsoil and the two sides of my pelvis were huffily turning their backs on each other and sidling apart, like siblings refusing to have their heights compared.

Three weeks out she started saying, ‘I don’t want to hear it’s anyone else’s birthday before mine.’ Now we’re down to four days and she is crying each morning because FOR THE LOVE OF PETE WHY ISN’T IT FRIDAY YET? I think the thing she is most looking forward to is breakfast in bed. She’s been begging me for it for months, and I finally capitulated and said that on the morning she turns five I will serve her breakfast in bed. Then I asked what she would like. Leek and potato soup, and baked beans on toast. I can’t think of a worse breakfast to serve in bed. Except maybe fondue, because that’s both messy and flammable.

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Nearly Three Years In

Tomorrow is May Blossom’s third birthday. If you’d asked me three years ago what I thought my life might look like now, I would have looked at you like you were crazy, because I now realise I never really looked much further than a few days ahead.

Pregnant, I could only focus on the birth. Once I had a newborn I couldn’t picture her as a toddler. As a toddler I couldn’t picture her as a pre-schooler. When I was pregnant with Garnet I couldn’t see how I could ever love another baby. Until a few weeks ago I couldn’t picture ever being able to work again for money. But lo and behold, here I find myself, 20 hours short of three years into this mothering business, and this morning, while my daughter rather too expertly navigates her way around ABC’s catch-up channel on the iPad, her 10-month-old brother naps in the pram, and I sit in the window seat writing this, I have already worked for three hours. It is 9.15.*

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Children’s Parties for the Back-yardless

May Blossom turned two a couple of weeks ago, which means that she now knows All The Things There Are To Know and All The Words To Everything, and it also means that I have now thrown two kids’ parties and am thus an expert in entertaining for smalls. Here is how to do it:.

Invitations: To get the numbers up, it’s useful invite people to your party. I used Paperless Post for electronic invitations. It is simple to use, has lovely designs to choose from and makes it easy to track RSVPs. We also chose to keep the party little this year, which was a good idea, so we just invited a child’s handful of very close friends. There somehow still ended up being twelve two-year-olds. That is a lot of toddlers. We must make more friends without two-year-olds (for a variety of reasons).

Location: Last year we had the party in a park that was a short drive away. That was fine and lovely, but logistically a bit hard. This year we went a thirty-second walk around the corner to the small local park, which would prove handy for H to trudge back and forth the whole time, escorting people to the loo, and getting extra jumpers and other forgotten essentials. We arrived to find OTHER PEOPLE were already having a party, so we scowled at them and set up on the other side of the park.

The other mob were about thirty seven-year-old boys being run ragged like they were in the Army Reserve by a hired PE teacher type of fellow. He had a broad-brimmed hat, a booming voice and a whistle. How is that a birthday party? They took up about eighty-five per cent of the park, leaving us the tiny strip of land next to the metre-high sheer precipitous drop down into the beer garden of the local bowling club. A perfect location for twelve toddlers. The parties managed to ignore each other like two cats who are forced to sleep in adjoining cages at the vet but know it’s only for a week. There were no turf wars. We were magnanimous when some of their guests came over to eat our fairy bread.  Who could blame them? Our party was clearly better.  Mostly because of the…

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Gracious Is My Middle Name

It was my birthday yesterday and I behaved like a shit. It happens every year. I spend the lead-up acting all nonchalant about it and not giving a toss about what plans are made and what presents I get, and then I complain about it all after the fact.

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You’re Older Than You’ve Ever Been And Now You’re Even Older

Approximately how many candles I will need for my birthday cake this year.

It’s my birthday soon. I’ll be older than ever before. There are lots of signs of this, beyond the creeping crow’s feet beside my eyes.

Sign 1. On the weekend H bought me a copy of InStyle magazine (don’t even get me started on that title. Whither the space bar, InStyle?). There was a coat featured that I can’t stop thinking about. It was designed by Max Mara, and it is basically a giant checked picnic blanket held on with buckles. It even has fringe. It is a ridiculous piece of clothing, but what made me snort with derision (young people roll their eyes, old people snort) was the editorial comment that the ‘scarf coat’ was a ‘great choice for a woman who might need an easier, less body-conscious fit’. The coat made the skinny young model look a bit hefty; a ‘woman who might need an easier, less body-conscious fit’ (magazine-talk for fat) would look like someone was hastily trying to hide a stolen refrigerator. All this is a long way of telling you that I now get pissed off at fashion magazines, like a grumpy old lady.

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Do Yourself A Favour

This morning, between baking four huge chocolate cakes and dealing with a toddler suffering from what I thought was fear of the noise the mixer made until I realised it was desperation to lick the batter off the beaters, I finished making the party favours for May Blossom’s birthday party.

Party favours aren’t something I had really planned. I might have flung a few sweets into a bought cellophane bag, maybe, if everything else had run smoothly (as if). Realistically, I probably wouldn’t have had anything to give the small guests to thank them for coming.

But now I do. Now each kid will receive a handmade paper box, decorated with a drawing of an owl and a pussycat in a boat — owl playing guitar, boat containing a jar of honey and plenty of money. Inside each box is an owl or a pussycat, made from denim stamped with paint from a handcarved rubber stamp, with vintage fabric backing, stuffed with a little filling so it’s soft and squishy. They have hanging tabs made from various ribbons. Every single one is different. There is also a chocolate frog in each box.

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Down With Diversity

WHY CAN’T YOU ALL BE THE SAME, STUPID PALE BABY SOCKS?

Where are your friends?

If this is some sort of sock conspiracy to make me lose my tiny mind and turn to the cooking sherry before nine in the morning, it’s working. Your reprobate other halves have until 9 am tomorrow to show themselves. After that I will glue eyes onto you and turn you into a family of mixed pastel sock puppets. You will be made an example of.

Don’t think I won’t do it. I have glue. I know where to buy eyes. I saw them not half an hour ago at the $2 shop while I was buying miniature wooden clothes pegs and paper doilies and double sided tape. I am, you see, suffering from a mild case of Craft. This morning I am fixated on making a banner a bit like this for May Blossom’s party. It’s probably just a twenty-four hour thing though. Having bought all the bits and pieces to make it I will unpack all the supplies, lose interest and then become obsessed with going to Ikea to buy a nifty box to store it all in.

Sometimes I suspect I need a job.

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