Another Birthday Weekend

This weekend marks the end of our March birthday season.  We still have a Virgo birthday season coming up, and then a single birthday soon after that.  But the March season is our busier time, as both those birthdays are children’s birthdays, and those are more exhausting to deal with than parent birthdays.  Parents tend to have moderately sedate birthdays.  Probably from being so tired after dealing with all the children’s birthdays.

In our family, we have the tradition of “the birthday weekend.”  This is a weekend, typically either the one before your birthday or the one after, where you call the shots.  You say what food we eat, what outings we do (within reason), and what activities we do at home.  If there are games to be played, you pick ’em.  If there are movies to be watched, you say which ones.  You say when we go outside and play with chalk on the patio, or get in the pool or jacuzzi, or just fire up the bubble machine.  Or you can decide that we should sit on the sofa and chill out, in which case (naturally) you get to control the remote.

So your birthday weekend is all about you, which is as it should be.  In a family of five, you’re constantly fighting for attention, so there ought to be at least one time in the year when you can get it for free.

This birthday weekend is for our youngest, who’s just turning two.  At that age, it’s a lot more difficult to figure out exactly what she wants us all to do, but we do the best we can.  We let her pick out a bouncy castle, which we had planted in our driveway all day Friday, and we invited over our Sister Family to share the bouncing, the jacuzzi, and some cake.  It was a rainbow cake, with rainbows on top made out of Twizzlers.  The Mother made a rainbow fruit plate out of watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple, green grapes, blueberries, and red grapes (which are of course purple).  We had rainbows coming out our butts.

Yesterday we chilled at home and ordered pizza and pasta for dinner (which are two of her favorite things to eat).  Today we went out shopping.  We went to a Toys “R” Us, which currently has a bunch of stuff on clearance.  Typically “sale” prices at TRU means only slightly more expensive than everywhere else (as opposed to way more expensive than everywhere else), but we got some pretty good bargains today.  Maybe Amazon is about to put them out of business too.  Wouldn’t surprise me.  (Or disappoint me, really.)

This particular Toys “R” Us that we went to is a combo TRU and Babies “R” Us store.  This meant that our two-year-old got to go clothes shopping.  She picked out about 15 dresses, which we finally managed to whittle down to 3.  After dealing with that, she found the shoe section.  She immediately plopped herself down and started to take off her shoes so she could try new ones on.  “Oosh!” she said, pointing, which is how she says “shoes.”  Stop and think for a moment about how terrifying that is.  Two years old and she’s already excited about shoe shopping.  This is a long, expensive adolescence I have ahead of me.

In any event, that’s been my weekend, so I’m pretty exhausted at this point.  Being at the beck and call of a two-year-old ain’t easy, ya know.  But at least now we’re good until late August.