Birthday blues

Yes, it’s about the pain in the ass part of birthdays. The boy’s birthday is coming up later this month and you would think that we were planning a wedding. I did that once. Never want to again. No, it’s not overly complex. It’s a swimming party. No, we don’t have a band, flowers, programs, dresses, suits, food (beyond cake) and all that. So I guess it is not a true pain in the ass.

But it’s such a pain to figure out who to invite. Really. Mrs. Conductor and I have sparred on this and of course, I lost. The pool we are using allows 20 kids under the price they charge. The boy ™ and I as well as Mrs. Conductor found 20 friends and we were good to go. No one was upset at who was left out. Then someone and that person that remain nameless. wondered aloud if we needed to invite his school class. We had seven kids coming but then Mrs. Conductor said, hey, this isn’t right. He’s the first party of the year and we need to invite everyone. I said no, he doesn’t know the kids and it’s too much money. It’s like five bucks more for each kid and we were going to be adding about 10 to 12 kids.

She (Mrs. Conductor) said he’s in kindergarten, you need to invite the whole class. I said no, invite his friends. Having 30 kids is going to be too much. I don’t want to have that many kids in the pool, these kids aren’t all going to come because their parents aren’t going to want to stay there and have to change their kids.

But I lost. At first, she was going to leave out of all his “true” friends for the school but I fought back on that and played the kid card. Got The boy ™ mad that his longtime friends might not come so we are stuck with a party of potentially 30 five and six year olds in a pool. Ugh. No way I am getting into the water now, and there is no way that I am going to sign off on bringing stuff to school now. I’ll lose that too but it is just crazy. Sigh.

The boy is going to have a great time and he’ll get more gifts than he knows what to do with. We are going to do the same thing we did last year which is ration the toys all year long. In fact he just got the last of his birthday presents a week or so ago. It’s just too much if you give a five-year-old 20 toys at one time. They never get played with or get buried in the bottom of a box. So he used all the gifts and had fun. Works for me.