Birthdays Are My Weakness

We had our first-ever birthday party for Blair last weekend. Her first real birthday party. At a place. That we paid for. With lots and lots and lots of money.

For the past five years, I’ve been feeling like a turd in a punchbowl, while Blair opened invitation after invitation, year after year, for the capital-B-Birthday Parties my friends were throwing for their kids. The first birthday at Gymboree! The second at Little Gym! Three at The Discovery Museum! Four in the Oval Office for a marbled quarter-sheet with Barack and Joe!

The most exciting thing I’d done? Invited kids to the house to decorate party hats with pipe cleaners. At least I made lunch. (The rainbow Jell-O mold took almost a whole day, but I couldn’t have looked at myself in the mirror if I’d skimped my little Blair out of having both a purple layer and a violet layer.) All along, I told Thad: “Five is a special year. We’ll make five special. We’ll blow it up at five.”

And blow it up we did.

The plan: Fourteen girls. Two hours. A place called Enchanted Dreams—Blair had never been there or even heard about it or even knew such a place existed outside of Orlando—where kids get to dress up in princess costumes, and not those crappy, flammable, dollar-store ones, but satin and silk flower-girl-level gowns with bows and lace and ribbon and sparkles that likely cost more than my wedding dress. Three staff—THREE!—would run the entire party, singing songs, teaching the hula, making a personalized necklace for Blair with beads that all of her friends “made wishes” on.

In the end, it would cost $500. But it would be epic.

When I sent out the evite, my friends wrote back, excitedly:

“Which princess are you getting?” I immediately felt turdlike again. Not only had their daughters been to parties at Enchanted Dreams before, but they’d been to parties where the parents opted to hire someone to dress as a Disney Princess for the low, low additional cost of $119.

“We’re not having a princess,” I said.

“Oh,” they said.

Turd mom. Mom turd. Turdy turdy turdy.

But, then, the day arrived. And Blair walked through the front door of Enchanted Dreams, past the huge sign, surrounded by balloons, that read, “Happy Birthday Blair!” And she put on a pink flowered dress with pink butterfly wings and a pink jeweled tiara. And her friends came and got dressed in ribbons and satin. I tried to help Blair into another dress, but one of the women on the staff said, “No no! You don’t have to do anything! Sit down! Relax!” Just before I walked to the back of the room where the other moms were snacking on cheese doodles, Blair whispered to me: “This is the coolest.”

I thought it was the coolest, too. For about a half hour. Then, as I watched my mother tiptoe around with the video camera, capturing "Blair’s Fifth Birthday Party" across the room, it suddenly seemed to be happening 100 miles away. Blair was over there, doing her thing. We were over here, not a part of it. That’s where our lives were heading. It was inevitable, I knew. It would happen soon. In five years. In three. In two. Sitting on the white lacquered chair, eating a piece of princess cake that I didn’t even cut, I thought to myself, Not yet.

“What was your favorite part?” I asked Blair as we drove home in the minivan.

“The cake!” she said.

“I mean, what was your favorite part of the party,” I asked.

“The presents!”

“What about the party part? The dress-up? The songs?”

“I wish it would have been funner,” she said.

Next year, I thought to myself, it will be. Cake. Presents. Pipe cleaners. The works.

   

We Are Unclean

There are ants in my kitchen--twenty or so of them. No matter how many times I murder them, they will not go away. They seem to send reinforcements, daily, on some late-night express-train from the yard, apparently wearing teeny-tiny haz-mat suits in order to penetrate the Fresh Linen-scented Raid I’ve sprayed along the edges of the doors and windows, like a toxic moat. And, still, they risk their lives, the Raid, the bottom of my flip-flops, me swearing at them, to search out the one thing that ants (and me, for that matter) are powerless to resist--a Cheeto.

When I woke up this morning, that was exactly where they were, crowded on top of a stale orange nub left on the floor overnight, all 20 of them, humping a Cheeto. I knew that the real problem was that there was a Cheeto left on the floor in the first place. And a fingerprint of Nutella. And a splotch of Raspberry Ice Crystal Light (which they loooooove). And various other crumbs and drips, which proved that, as a housekeeper, I was a lazy sow. While I wasn’t exactly okay with that title, I’d not quite evolved to the point where, after the kids went to bed at night, I’d roll my lazy sow butt off of the couch and pull out the Swiffer.

Until this morning. When my four-year-old woke up and, upon dragging her blanket across the kitchen floor—the blanket that she carries everywhere—invented a new game: Ant Spotting.

“There’s one, Mommy!” Blair shouted, proudly.

“There’s another one,” she shouted, even more proudly, as if two ants were better than one.

The time had come. I needed to open up a big can of Whoop Ants.

The trick, I learned by googling “Kill Ants,” was to locate their source, which I knew was a patch of dirt under the kitchen window that contained what I decided was, roughly, 834 million ants. To destroy the hill, I had to destroy the queen. But destroying the queen wasn’t so easy. There were many suggestions online, ranging from dousing the hill with the hose, to pouring undistilled white vinegar all over it, to setting it on fire. I liked the idea of setting them on fire best, but I thought it wouldn’t be wise. And, while there were remedies that involved products like Boric acid, I didn’t have Boric acid on hand, and thought that walking three blocks to the Ace Hardware would take too much time. I wanted them dead. Now.

“What are you doing, mommy?”

“I’m boiling water.”

“Why?”

“To kill the ants.”

“How will boiling water kill the ants?”

I paused. I thought about being honest about the sure-fire method I’d read about online, which included the phrase “scald them to death.” I thought about explaining that I didn’t plan to stop after pouring bubbling, boiling water on them, that I would then sprinkle grits all over the dirt, which the hangers-on would pick up and eat and carry to their queen, if she wasn’t already vaporized, for her to eat. Then, the next time they took a sip of water, the grits would expand in their ant-tummies and they would explode. Pop.

“Oh sweetie,” I said, instead. “The ants will just float away.”

It took me one hour, six pots of boiling water, two splashes onto my right ankle (leading to a 2nd degree burn), one full can of quick-cooking grits, and seventeen F-words, but I did it.

Or I thought I did it.

The next morning, as Blair and I sat on the couch watching Blues Clues, she pointed toward the sliding glass door and screamed: “Ant! Mommy! ANT!” I leapt up as if I was a vampire frenzied for blood, practically levitating over to the door, where I began to stomp. And swear. And stomp. And swear.

“Did you dead it?” Blair asked, after the crazy left my eyes.

“Yes, I dead-ed it.”

“Can I dead the next one?”

I paused. Again. Debating which might be the more valuable lesson. Then, I answered her:

“Only if you put your shoes on.”