Party Time

It’s now October. In our family there are three birthdays this month, plus one Name Day.

Clea-Noelle turns two next week. We are having a small, family oriented birthday celebration for her over the weekend. Like last year, the photographer Eileen Broderick will come and shoot pictures for an album of her special day (our gift to her). The kids will this week pick out something to give their baby sister, make cards. I will get all the paper-y decorations in pink for a two-year-old. Plus balloons. I will get either cupcakes or an ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry’s, so everyone will actually eat it. Are mine the only kids who don’t really like cake that much?

Then Halloween is Christiane's and Constantine's 4th birthdays. But not only are we having a costume party with their fellow “morning” students from their classes, we also have to celebrate Halloween, plus do the birthdays in both of their classrooms, where we sing “The Earth Goes Round the Sun…” and circle this globe as many times as they are old, plus show pictures from each age, twice that day, in Primary A and Primary B.

Plus, we have to do this for Clea-Noelle in the Toddler Room.

Plus… Well, there is a life to lead outside of children’s birthdays!!

And once this is all done, we start thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Or I just book a cruise down the Nile.

I want to do everything Right, Correct, Just So. I also (secretly) would not mind sort of ignoring the whole thing. But it’s my job basically to do just this! To supervise that homework gets done, teeth are brushed, and hair gets trimmed. Flu mists gets administered up their noses. If there is some rash it gets treated with the appropriate ointment.

The younger three were all so lovely emerging from the car today at drop-off, wearing their bright colored backpacks. Clustering before heading into school.

I just wanted to freeze the moment. Snap a picture. Take them all in.

They grow too fast. I knew this and I know this and I will even more so know this! My mother-in-law used to say that time speeds us the older you get. No fair. Another sad truth of staying on this planet year after year. That along with arm flab, considering tummy tucks, and seeing a seminar about menopause posted on Avon Patch and wondering who would actually dare go?

Ya. Birthdays. They get older. Longer. Bigger all around. They mean more somehow. And we step aside and make way.