Okay, I lied.  There are two more thoughts I want to unpack from the party posts.

Yesterday, we went to a Purim carnival, just as we do every year.  The twins got dressed up in costumes, ate cotton candy (okay, that was the ChickieNob; the Wolvog would never touch something the consistency of cotton candy), and played carnival games for plastic prizes or stuffed animals.  They jumped inside the bouncey castles and hurtled down the inflatable slide.  And I spent some of the time thinking, “how many more of these will we get to do?”

Because that’s one of the problems with kids: they age out of things, and usually before you are ready.  This blog started with giving up the bottle.  When I wrote that post, I truly didn’t believe that I would still be writing here, eight years later, without another child.  I thought I would get to go through everything again.  But years ago, we switched mentally to, “we will likely not get to experience this again,” and since, I have noted each last, usually after it happened since you never seem to know when your last is going to be your last until it is your last.

So I have watched them age out of each childish thing, and that is a good thing.  You wouldn’t want a person to stay babyish forever.  But it’s still a hard thing to go through again and again.  If you’re terrible at having your child age, you never get better at it.  And if you’re fine with having your child age, this post probably won’t make a lot of sense to you.  So I guess I am writing it for people like me; people who are constantly looking at the moments they love and wondering how many more of them they’ll get to have.

There is no part of parenting I dislike (well, except maybe the tantrums).  I like combing the ChickieNob’s hair. (How much longer will she let me do it?  I stopped having my mother do my hair by 12 because she couldn’t get the hairsprayed bangs quite right.)  I like clipping their nails and making them costumes and reading them books.  I like driving them around to activities.  I like birthday parties and Purim carnivals and trick-or-treating.  And I know that all of these things will run out, dry up.  They will need me less and less as they age, or need me in a very different way.  They will want to do these activities less and less as they age.  How much longer do I have with birthday parties and Purim carnivals?  A year or two?  Maybe more?  Maybe less?  This could be the last one but I might not know it until it’s the last one.

We have a lot of ticking clocks in our life right now, and these intangible clocks tick very loudly.  I think about time all the… time.  We’re waiting for things to happen, waiting for things to be over.  Dreading things coming up, dreading things to be over.  Having a lot of clocks ticking at once makes it pretty damn loud in my head.

Sometimes I mistake the ticking sound from the mental clocks as bombs, and I cringe, waiting for the explosion until I remember that they’re just ordinary alarm clocks.  Everyone has them in their life.  No one gets unlimited, unfettered time.  The ticking is not indicating an upcoming destruction of my life.  The most important things in my life will still be here after those alarms go off and I need to wake up and start the next day of my life.  Because the reality is that the bombs in life are mostly silent, and they don’t give you a warning tick before they explode, bastards that they are.

What we’re hearing right now is just the good, old-fashioned passing of time, marking what we are waiting for and what we are wistful to have come to an end.

So I’ll grab whatever last Purim carnivals and birthday parties I can before it’s too late and we leave this stage of life.  The next stage will be interesting too, but it won’t be like this one.  The celebrations will be more subdued, more grown-up, smaller, less chaotic and less colourful.

Maybe that is why I think so hard and work so hard to throw parties: because I am already mourning the end of them.

I was standing in the exact same space, next to my bed, when I learned that my most valuable friendship at the time was over and that Kurt Cobain had died.  Actually, only the physical space was the same.  The friendship ended in the fall.  Kurt died in the spring.  In between, we continued to live with one another to ride out the end of our lease.

But I was standing, both times, on the same side of my bed to receive the bad news.  And both times, it was my friend who delivered the news: that our friendship was over and that Kurt Cobain was dead.

Lightning is not supposed to hit the same space twice.

In my head, the end of my friendship and Kurt Cobain’s death always goes together despite the two events being many months apart.  The day he died, we sank down onto the sofa together and watched hours and hours of MTV’s coverage.  At some point, I popped a tape in the VCR.  I still have 6 hours of MTV footage from the day that Kurt Cobain died.

He died — they think — on April 5th, but his body wasn’t found until April 8th, which is when the rest of the world learned about it.  This April will mark 20 years — 20 years! — since I sat on that junky sofa and stared at Kurt Loder telling me over and over again that Kurt Cobain was dead.  20 years since my best friend told me that our friendship was dead.  We’ve long passed that tipping point when we’ve been not-friends longer than we were friends.  But two decades: that feels like an ocean of time.

It is always odd when your personal monumental moments get mixed up in larger world-scale events.  Our wedding intersected with September 11th, the twins’ birth coincided with the Olympics.  Since humans like to keep marking anniversaries, coverage of these world-scale events keep reminding you over and over again of the distance time has taken you from the personal.  We’ve been married twelve years.  The Olympics has rolled around yet again.  It has been 20 years since I lost that friendship.

I’m sure that next month will bring a plethora of Kurt Cobain memorial articles; a re-airing of MTV’s Unplugged concert.  We’ll keep thinking about him again and again; his music will start playing in all these spaces where his music hasn’t played in years.  Every time I hear a Nirvana song, I’ll think of her and sitting on that sofa together, the desire to watch the coverage transcending the fact that our friendship was dead, too.

I’m thinking of getting myself the Unplugged album off iTunes next month as a 40th birthday gift to myself — it’s the only one I don’t own.  I deserve it, right, for getting through 40 years?  In the meantime, I can keep watching the concert off the VHS tape, or on YouTube.  If you’ve never seen it, it’s probably my favourite performance of their songs:

Letting the last of the comments trickle in on the party posts, and then I have one last thought I’ll post this weekend.  Just waiting until everyone else has their say first.

*******

I recently started drinking almond milk, and I love it.  I’m not really an almond milk sort of person.  I’m not sure what sort of person is an almond milk sort of person, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t me.  But my sister coached me on a brand to try, and I started eating it over cereal.  It’s amazing.  I don’t know if I’d want to drink a whole glass of the stuff, but over cereal?  It’s like dessert.

Why am I telling you this?  Because a friend told me about it, and then I asked my sister about it.  And… look at me… now I’m drinking almond milk.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Golden Ticket” (Serenity Now!)
• “The Flood and After” (Invincible Spring)
• “The Mom’s Club: Outside Looking In” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “Infertility’s Waiting Room” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It’s Baby Day for MoJo Working.  Any time you’ve followed someone’s family building path for so long, you can’t help but be awed with them that the moment has arrived that they’ve been waiting for so many years to reach.  She admits, “I’m both terrified and excited, while in a suspended state of disbelief. I’ve just never really allowed myself to ‘go there,’ at least not in many, many, years. It’s been a decade of ‘one step at a time’ and living moment to moment, trying to just make it to the next milestone. The last milestone is here, friends.”  Congratulations!

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post reflecting on her experience with infertility.  It’s an interesting post (and a lively discussion in the comment section) about the chiasm that occurred for the author between reaching that lowest point in the journey and the gratitude she feels today.  I like the comparison she makes to the stages of cancer and surviving a life-threatening illness.  Very thought-provoking post, and all who know me well know that I always fall hard for a palistrophe.

Lastly, it’s cryptic and I was very intrigued by My Lady of the Lantern’s post about her dream connection with her mother.  She writes, “I have never stopped myself from hovering over those months ever. But it appears to me that I automatically skip tracks. I don’t plan to tell my mother over the perspective I have developed lest it hurt her. Dreams are therapy.”  The writing in the post is dream-like, lending an unreal quality to the words as if you’re about to wake.

The roundup to the Roundup: One more thought on birthday parties coming soon.  I love almond milk.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 7th and March 14th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

So I put up that last post to get ideas, but what happened was that your comments stunned the twins.  They couldn’t believe how many kids didn’t have a birthday party at all.  They’ve had one every year since they turned one.  Their first one was a big one because we couldn’t do a baby naming (a Jewish ceremony) at birth due to their prematurity, so we held a big baby naming/introducing them to the community party as they turned one.

When they were very little, the other kids at the party were mostly our friend’s kids.  As they aged, they found their own friends, and now it is more of the other way around: I have become friends with their friend’s parents.  And the kids at the party are all mixed up: old friends/school friends/camp friends, etc.

Most of their friends have parties.  There are a few kids that we don’t know about: they don’t reciprocate the invitation, but we don’t know if that is because they are having a party and not inviting us, or if they only have a family party (or no party at all).  They twins usually invite them anyway despite the fact that the invitations are one-sided because they socialize with them in school or through another activity.  But that’s just us and how we construct our guest list.

Oh — and the twins could have separate parties and they’ve been encouraged to have separate parties, but they want to hold their party together.  We leave those types of decisions up to them.  They may not care about having their own party because they each separately get one special day that is their day (ChickieNob Day or Wolvog Day) each year since they have to share their birthday.  On that day, they get to pick the activity, the meals, and usually get a lot of sugar.  We also have two birthday celebrations with family where it’s just dinner and cake.  All in all, they’re well-celebrated.

So here’s the thing, we’re getting towards the end of the birthday party life span.  As they get older, the parties will become more and more casual; a few friends out to dinner, etc.  Slumber parties.  Grabbing your four closest friends and going to a baseball game.  It really feels like this is it: we maybe have two or three more years of this and then fade out into casual, intimate celebrations.  I think I’ll miss the big parties as it is one more marker that they are growing up.

But still, I posed the question to them about which they would want the most: a party, a trip, or a present.  They ranked it party, trip, present, with party being the most important to them.  They love a good trip, and they said they may want to do that in the future.  Take a small trip around their birthday and then just have dinner and cake with friends.  We’re not a big present family: we usually give them things as they need/want things rather than saving it for a holiday or birthday.  So present was a distant third priority.

But one of the biggest reasons they gave for wanting the party is that they don’t want to be left out of things socially, and having a party ensures they’ll be included in other people’s parties.  The Wolvog admitted that he would be very jealous if he knew parties were going on and he wasn’t invited because kids knew he’d never reciprocate with his own party.

He asked me to ask you this question: do you accept party invitations if you don’t throw parties?

He asked this because I’ve always told them that if they go to someone’s party, they should invite them back to their party.  If they don’t want that person at their party, they probably shouldn’t go to their party, even if their other friends are going.  You go for the birthday kid, not your other friends or the activity.  It’s not a perfect tit-for-tat system, but I would say that the vast majority of their guest list are people whose parties they also attended.

He wanted to know how that worked: did people feel awkward accepting invitations knowing they wouldn’t be extending one later?  Did the kids who never had a party get invited to a bunch of parties each year, or were they mostly left out of the party scene?  Was it common in your circle of friends to not have parties therefore it wasn’t really an issue?

So… uh… I guess my piggyback question is how people construct their guest lists.

I am not a fan of kid birthday parties: going or throwing.  I think that kids need them insofar as they allow that kid to bask in being the center of attention for a few hours once a year.  Most people benefit emotionally from being the birthday girl or boy and feeling celebrated.  But birthday parties bring stress, pure and simple, and I’m never sure if I really believe that the benefits outweigh the stress or if I just go along with the status quo instead of breaking free of the birthday party ball and chain.

Image: Will Clayton via Flickr

There are the ones your kid is not invited to, and the ones that your kid is invited to but their friends are not, and now the friends are jealous.  There are the ones where the activity doesn’t really match your kid. (Uh… is this one unique to us?  There are a bunch of activities that really stress them out.)  There are the ones where you don’t really approve of the activity, and you have to navigate your morals and kid friendships.  There are the ones your kid goes to and has a miserable time, and the ones your kid goes to and has an amazing time but you suspect this is more due to the activity than their closeness to the birthday child.  You need to buy gifts for people you sometimes barely know and take a guess on their interests. And how much do you spend on said gift?

And then throwing them.  I start worrying about this in winter.  Their birthday is in summer.

We don’t really have space in our house to have a party.  Unless it’s a veeeeeeeery small party.  One of the drawbacks of being a non-television-loving  family is that we don’t really have a space set up to watch a movie.  We don’t have a big backyard.  Or really much of any backyard.  After once planning an outdoor birthday party and being stressed out for weeks about weather, we’ve said never again to an outdoor party.  We don’t want to spend a lot of money on the party; I think parties have gotten a bit out of control with the cost and the expectations of activity.  And I would like the effort expended on my end to be on the low-side right now due to other life stressors.

It’s a pretty steep set of requirements.

I’ve come up with a Plan B that fits most of my requirements: out of the house, indoors, somewhat affordable, BUT… it will take hours upon hours of my time to prepare the activity, run the activity, and clean-up from the activity.  We’re talking hours.  And hours.

So, I’m turning it over to you for ideas.  No, you don’t need to have a kid to have an opinion on this.  All of you were a kid, so you are all capable of weighing in.  Tell me about great birthday parties from your past or ones you’ve thrown or ones you’ve attended.  I’m really wracking my brain to come up with something brilliant that fits the parameters.

Parameters:

• Needs to be outside the house.
• Needs to be good for about 16 – 20 9-year-olds that will be a mix of boys and girls.
• Needs to be semi-inexpensive.
• Needs to be a reasonable amount of work instead of a Herculean amount of work.

Extra points for creativity.

My Plan B is decent*.  It won’t be too expensive.  It’s creative.  It’s memorable.  It’s just the amount of work involved that is keeping me from making it my Plan A.  Please give me a better plan.  Pretty please?

Actually, let’s crowd source a multitude of party ideas.  In fact, why doesn’t everyone throw every age into the pot — from birth to death — and list best party ideas you’ve ever executed or experienced, and everyone can grab what they need.

* Yes, I will tell you my semi-okay Plan B idea in a few weeks once I surprise the twins with it… or not.