Birthday party season

You know how it is. Kids' birthday party season, about nine months after the season when all the parents decided to make extra people. Swing sets and dirty feet. The smell of baby wipes in the air. Little hands slathered with an admixture of SPF 50, bubble solution, and purple grocery store sheet cake (no less than 70% frosting). Pizza on paper plates, cheese fast congealing. Maybe some token beers for the adults. But let's be honest: This party is for the kids. You're only here because you're designated driver and you can open juice boxes like a pro.The best part is the parents awkwardly standing around trying and failing not to talk about kids or jobs. Because really, what else is there? A kid interrupts you mid-answer; you were starting to open up about what you really thought about your job. Have a moment. Or maybe just unburden yourself on a fellow survivor. But this conversation is fated not to happen.This kid, maybe your own, maybe someone else's for whom you feel unreasonably responsible, demands something from you. Another juice box, perhaps. Maybe they have to poop and they decided you should be the first to know. Or, maybe, just maybe, they desperately need a nose wipe, and actually requested help instead of smearing it across their cheek with Doritos-encrusted knuckles.You pull a fresh tissue from your pocket, because you always have a fresh tissue in your pocket—you're a goddamned parent. You go in for the attack, but the kid demands to do it themself. You roll your eyes and hand the tissue over. They give it a swipe, and cheerily hand it back. Only after you grab it reflexively do you realize it was snot-side up. Another day, another handful of other people's boogers.Maybe there's a bouncy house, perhaps a trampoline. Something, anything, to work the sugar out of their collective systems a bit before they crash. The kids start running around in loose packs, roving, half delirious. Staying this late, you're in dangerous territory. Wiser parents, veterans, those with a couple of kids under their belt, have already slunk out. Meanwhile, the little hellions have started jumping off of things that should probably not be jumped off of. Throwing things that should probably not be thrown. Shrieking with glee, and shrieking when someone takes the thing that they thought was theirs. Basically, a lot of shrieking.Cars skitter across the floor, as if self-propelled. In some cases, they are. Something plastic from China, overturned, lights up and blares a nursery rhyme as a gaggle of kids stream past. A forgotten doll cooks on the front burner of a play kitchen.At some point, you lose eyes on the target. You experience a moment of panic. But then you calculate the odds of a trip to the ER. Or a shattered family heirloom. Or the little sweetheart deciding to take a dump on the hardwood. All of that, weighed against a momentary and oddly unfamiliar sense of peace washing over you.When your kiddo does finally crash from the heady combination of over-stimulation and lack of sleep—and it is a certainty—it's spectacular. Hopefully by then, you've at least made it to the car and taken up a defensive position. You know, with the child demon strapped securely into the car seat before the talking in tongues and noggin spinning round: I dropped the other one, Daddy, I dropped the other one, and I can't reach it from my car seat, Daddy. I want the other one. It's a crisis, Daddy, because the other one, the actual name for which I do not know, the thing I did not know existed until five minutes prior when I acquired it as a party favor, I absolutely must have. Right now. Not when we get home, and most certainly not when we stop the car.You do make it home, but barely. Tears are shed. The kid cries a lot too. You rocket through the house, slowing down only long enough to give some feet or hands a cursory rinse, grab a comfort animal or three, and throw the little turnip into bed, shuttering the bedroom door, crossing yourself, and sliding down the wall in the hallway.Welcome to birthday season. You're hosting the next one. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2RIpqTr