My wife was on the phone to my sister, Maeve. Their tone seemed grave. ‘Can you not put cream on it?’ she said, conjuring images of my sister covered head to toe with third-degree burns. A more dutiful brother would have inquired after his sister’s health, but I was following our two-year-old daughter up some wooden stairs she’d decided to mount while soaking wet and barefoot.
Thirty seconds later, I heard my wife say, ‘Just use chocolate,’ which caused a half second of further confusion before I realised they were discussing cake, and their gravity of tone owed to the stresses involved in my son’s sixth birthday preparations.
Everything about planning a child’s birthday party is stressful. Not babies, they’re easy. Just plop them down with a muffin and a candle and they’ll be delighted. Babies are so undiscerning, you could simply walk around until you found another baby’s birthday taking place in your local park, join in and they’d have the best day of their lives with perfect strangers. Even that is probably doing too much. You could just show them a fire engine, a picture of a jellyfish, or a crude drawing of your own face. For all the many horrors of parenting in the early years, your child’s utter lack of a meaningful social life is a real bonus.
Our toddler is still in this phase, something for which I thank myself as I stop her fitting a cat’s entire head into her mouth. My son, by contrast, is quite particular in his needs. He’s never wanted a big party, with dozens of kids, a bouncy castle and an entertainer, because he gets a bit overwhelmed by large groups. Even when we explained that such an arrangement would net him many more presents, he remained steadfast that we keep it small.
This arrangement suits us because we are bad, lazy parents who would rather not be directly in charge of 30 children even for a short period of time and we feel our children provide enough chaos in our lives already, so avoiding any additional extras is worthwhile.
In the end, we took 10 kids to our local trampoline park. The first hour was spent happily jumping until he and all his friends were covered in the kind of puppy dog sweat that makes a six-year-old look like a coalminer clocking off. The second was spent in a ‘party room’ on site, whose bare walls and folding tables had all the charm of a Soviet crematorium.
There, I made a little girl cry when I called her out for moving during musical statues, so much so that I lost my nerve and let everyone stay in the game for ever. Pin the tail on the dinosaur resulted in every adult leaving the space, unknowingly, with a T-rex tail appended to their arse.
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On seeing my sister’s beautiful chocolate-topped cake, my daughter tried to head-butt it full force with the candles still lit. It was chaos, after all. But it was beautiful, wonderful chaos.
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