Birthdays n' Such

Mo and Shay are “Irish Twins.”  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it doesn’t mean they are Irish or twins, but that they are less than a year apart in age. So for eight glorious days this year, they were both seven.  This delighted Shay the Younger and infuriated Mo the Elder.  It’s funny.  Kids don’t understand that just because they briefly hold up the same number of fingers in response to someone asking them how old they are doesn’t mean they are, in fact, the exact same age.  So for eight days, I heard various versions of “you can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my older sister anymore,” and then eight days later I heard, “yea!  I’m the older sister again!”  And to throw an even bigger wrench into the mix, Mo’s birthday is on March 1^st, so I briefly (VERY briefly) tried to explain that if she had been born on a leap year, her birthday would have been February 29^th and would therefore have been a leap baby.  Jesus.  If you can avoid it, never try to explain a leap year to a kid.  I think pre-teen is the best time for that.  PG-13 movies, the big sex talk, and leap years.  Because when I told her that every four years their birthdays are nine days apart, and that if she were a leap baby she would only have had one birthday so far, her face twisted up so much I was afraid it would hurt her.  So I told her quickly to forget about it, that I’d explain it later.  For some reason I always forget they are seven.  Probably because they seem oddly grown-up at times, which always takes me off guard.  For instance, the other night I thought the girls were in the other room, so I turned on The Walking Dead.  A part came up when a zombie’s head was closed in a hatchback door, causing it to explode all over the windows.  Pretty sweet.  And before I could open my mouth to say, “AWESOME!”, from behind me I heard Shay’s impish voice say “oooooh!” and then start laughing in a way that indicated both disgust and amusement.  Just as I was doing.  I think Shay may be my movie buddy in a few years.  Mo gets scared at “Babe: Pig in the City.”  Maybe Mo can go see some “Traveling Beaches Ya Ya Joy Luck Fried Green Vagina Pants Sisterhood Monologues” with Mom, and Shay and I will go see zombie flicks.  But I digress.

Because the girls are foster kids, they are not allowed to stay overnight at anyone’s house that hasn’t been vetted by Child Protective Services.  That means there have been some tears when the girls are told “no” when a friend asks them to a sleepover.  They don’t understand why the rules are what they are, especially when they have known their friends since before they were foster kids.  They’ve stayed at friend’s houses before, why can’t they stay over now?  Kind of hard to explain to them, so we just tell them it’s the rules, we’re sorry, and try to get them to stop crying by distracting them with sugar or movies or some other terribly lazy parental ploy.  And in the thick of one of these moments of woe, we told them both, that because their birthdays were so close, we would have “one big party and your friends can sleep over.” 

Whoops. 

I thought they might forget what we had said, but that’s wishful thinking.  Kids don’t forget anything you want them to.  So the next day they were hootin’ and hollerin’ about their sleepover party and asked almost every day for the next three months about it.

Stuck.

So, we told them to give us a list of kids they wanted to invite, phone numbers of parents, that kind of thing.  Slowly but surely we compiled a list of just about everyone in BOTH their classes.  They had asked if we could have a bounce house for the party.  We thought about it, figured it was cheaper and hell of a lot less creepy than a clown, so we relented.  Upon this news, the list of kids saying they were coming doubled.  Dread set in as the day grew near, and that day finally came about three weeks ago.  God, we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves in to. 

The Friday prior to the party, Amy gets a phone call from one of the parents.  This parent voiced some concerns. 

Mom:  “Does (let’s say, Amber) really have to bring dresses and eye shadow to the party?  And are you taking the kids to Chuck E Cheese afterward?”

Amy:  “Uhhhhh…nooooo….neither of those things.”

Mom:  “Oh.  Okay.  Good.  Amber said there was a fashion show and then Chuck E Cheese.  I was wondering what the real story is.”

Amy: “I think Mo might have been exaggerating on the party a little.  It’s just a bounce house, classmates, some of our friends with kids, and the girls can sleep over afterward.  We have dress up clothes and whatever for the girls.”

Mom:  “Sounds good.  Also, Amber said (let’s say, Sarah) is invited to the party and might go.  Sarah is kind of a bully and Amber is worried about her.  I didn’t know if you knew Sarah.”

Amy:  “Uh oh.  No, don’t know her, but we’ll keep an eye on it.  Thanks for the heads up.”

The rest of the day we spent cleaning and getting ready for the party. 

Fast forward to one o’clock the next afternoon.  I’d been outside smoking two briskets and three racks of ribs.  A truck pulls up with a trailer and backs into the drive.  It’s the rental guy with the bounce house.  He gets out, looks around, and begins wondering aloud, “where is this thing going to go?”  So I walk up to him and ask him how much room he needs.  Turns out this damn thing is HUGE.  Seventeen feet tall.  Almost as tall as our real house.  When we figure out where this pink and purple monstrosity will go, he blows it up with some industrial fan, and the entire driveway is transformed into a princess castle.  

Now, I have to tell you that one of the things on my bucket list is to get a bounce house and spend all day just keeping kids out of it.  You know, jump out of bushes and what not and tell them to “Git the hell outta here!!!”  That kind of thing.  It’d be awesome.  But, I figured today wasn’t the day, so I let the kids get in and have fun.

Four o’clock rolls around the place explodes with people.  There must’ve been forty kids and almost that many adults.  It really was a lot of fun.  Dads hung out in the garage, snuck beers, talked about each other’s smoking recipes, motorcycles, cars, basketball, ruh ruh ruuuuuh!  Ladies talking and watching kids bounce around.  Every now and then some bizarre phrase would waft over to me from the parents surrounding the throng of bouncing children. “Shelly, don’t take your pants off,” or “Get off his head,” or “Did you poop?  Did you?  You better not poop! ” I just let those tidbits of randomness rise up and float away like the smoke from the barbeque.  Pretty fun. 

After people ate came the piñata.  Amy made the announcement and led a trail of screeching kids to the front yard like some pint-sized Pied Piper.  A few minutes later I decide I don’t want to miss the impending  melee.  As I’m rounding the corner, I see a line of kids thirty deep.  At the front is an older kid, holding an old broom handle.  Without a blindfold.  She’s carefully gauging the arc of her cut with slow, malevolent practice swings, like Babe Ruth had just stepped up to the plate.  Before I can remind everyone that the children need to be blindfolded during their turns, this kid laces into the papier mache and the whole damn thing disintegrates into a perfectly symmetrical starburst of cheap, flying candy.  The radius must have been twenty five yards when it was all said and done.  A communal moan of disappointment escaped from the line of expectant kids as they sulked and stomped around for chalky candy hiding in the cold grass.  The home run champ looked pretty proud of herself as she eyed the evidence of her swift and decisive victory.  “Well, shit, I guess that’s all done,” I think to myself.  Amy’s wondering how the kid could have done it in one hit.  I tell her it’s because she didn’t have a blindfold and was probably 100 pounds already.  Next time I’ll know, she says. 

When I was in the first grade, I went to a friend’s birthday party.  He had cake and a water balloon fight in his backyard.  Another friend of mine started to cry and moan because he didn’t want to eat cake before the water balloons.  He cried for half the party.  The birthday boy’s Dad STILL holds it against the kid (who isn’t a kid anymore but a doctor), and every time that person comes up, my friend’s Dad just rolls his eyes and begins to talk about how annoyed he was.  I never understood that until this party. 

Turns out, Amber was worried about Sarah being a bully because she in fact is a bully herself.  And there ain’t enough room in the bounce house for two bossy kids.  But hooray for Amber, Sarah couldn’t come to the party anyway, so Amber had her run of the place.  “Mo is MY best friend and nobody else’s!” she’d scream.  Which wasn’t true, Mo barely likes the girl, who towers over the rest of the kids and probably has twenty pounds on them.  She’d cry because there were other kids in the bounce house, she’d cry because someone gave Mo a better gift than she did (which, by the way, was the creepiest, weirdest life-sized baby doll in the world, and I hate that it is in my house now, watching me from the chair), she wanted the “best friends” necklace Mo’s actual best friend gave her, she wanted the bowl of chips to herself, etc etc etc.  Cry, demand, mock, laugh, cry, demand, mock, laugh.  So is the cycle of bossy kids.  We just kind of ignored it when she’d complain to us about something, like the chips weren’t her favorite or whatever.  We figure it was her parents’ problem not ours and we just had to get through the night.  Earlier I had been a little perplexed by how many parents just kind of dropped their kids off for the night, barely introduced themselves and were out of there like a shot.  “Here you go, here’s my number, call if she’s dead, BYE, SUCKA!!!” That’s kind of what it felt like.  Well, I guess now I know why. 

People trickled out around eight.  I was already exhausted, and as I was helping the bounce house guy load the princess castle into the truck, I realized how long my night was about to be.  From inside I just heard screaming and laughing and banging.  I went inside, and they were having some fashion show, so

I did a quick about-face and went back to the garage with some friends.  What was I going to do with a damned fashion show?  I guess I could have pretended to take pictures or something, played along.  Probably should have.  But, I didn’t.  Couldn’t.  Didn’t want to.  Besides, I knew by the look in Amy’s eye that she’d be asleep in exactly twenty five minutes (that’s the precise amount of time between the onset of “sleepy eyes” to utter system failure).  I knew at that moment I was to be the night shift sheriff of the girl’s party.

They watched some ridiculous movies up in the guest room until about midnight.  That’s when I went up and told them to start winding down.  What a stupid thing to do.  Why do we always say “hey, it’s time to start thinking about maybe getting ready for bed?”  Good Lord, you might as well throw Mountain Dews and Pixie Sticks at them.  Amber the Big Boss snickered and giggled mockingly at me.  Briefly I entertained the idea of swiftly defenestrating her and then laughing down at her from the newly smashed window, but decided against it.  Jail would suck.  So I figured I’d just do the Bob Kieber and hold it against her for the rest of her life.

There was an inverse relationship between my pleasantness and the number of visits I made upstairs.  On the second visit I told them to separate into a “sleepy” room and a “movie” room, but that there was no “loud” room.  They promptly separated into two rooms and made them both loud. 

On the third visit upstairs, I opened the door and realized that little girls to the EXACT same thing little boys do on sleepovers.  They fart and laugh about it.  I opened the door and thought I had stepped into a bathroom stall with a backed up toilet at a truck stop in hell.  Somehow I wasn’t surprised Amber was at the center of this gastrointestinal holocaust.  I opened the windows, told them that tomorrow I was going to have to hire Chuck Norris to throw this room into the sun because there was no hope for it.  Amber rolled her eyes at me.  Again…defenestration.  Again…no, let her parents deal with this little bundle of joy.  I’m much sterner as I tell them to go to sleep, as proofed by the amount of times I used “seriously.” 

“No, seriously, you can’t sleep in the closet.  No, not all of you can fit in that bed.  Seriously.  Find a place and lay down.  Seriously, guys, seriously.  Totally serious here.”  Might as well of told them that I was a toothless little bitch. 

On the fourth visit, I told them that enough was enough, it was two in the morning and if they weren’t going to go to sleep then they had to go home.  That only made Mo upset with me because I was starting to embarrass her, which was not my goal.  Well, not on her birthday anyway. 

Fifth visit, most were sleeping, few were awake, but Amber was now crying because someone told her to shut up.  I told the girls to be nice or go home, and that no one says “shut up.”  But I wanted to find that girl and shake her hand.  Well done, little hero.  Well done.

I woke in a panic at six am, still in my clothes, reeking of barbeque, sweat, fear, and anger.  A DVD menu loop was blaring at me over and over again.  I had fallen asleep on the couch to some horror movie I rented.  I listened.  No sounds from upstairs.  I smiled, curled up, and slept for another half hour.

Woke up, snuck out, bought a couple dozen donuts and presented them to the girls, who were, by the time I got back, awake and thumping around upstairs.  They complained about who got what donut, who got two, etc.  I just nodded and smiled and said, “well, you’re going home in an hour.” 

An hour later sheepish parents showed up, saw my raggedy appearance, and shook their heads at me.  One guy asked if this was my first sleepover.  I told him it was.  He started laughing.  Told me I was brave.  I told him it wasn’t bravery to do something when you don’t realize the danger.  If I do it again next  year, well, that…THAT would be brave.