He turns One
We just celebrated Baby Brother’s first birthday. Yay!!! If you think planning a one year old birthday party would provide plenty to write about, you’re absolutely right. Except, I don’t feel like writing. I’m exhausted, I haven’t been exercising and I’ve fallen back into poor eating habits. Those three things go together - lack of exercise, poor diet and tiredness - they’re a tag team. Well, I didn’t plan to write about me and my exhaustion (though now that I’ve written about it, I know I’ll deal with it). I wanted to write about Baby Brother’s birthday.
“We’ll keep it small” we had decided. We told a few friends who had little kids. “We’ll just hang out with friends and eat naija food”. I’ll do all the cooking, it shouldn’t be a big deal. Just a few friends.
A few days to the party, I made a list of everyone we had invited. Just 8. “Not bad”, I thought. “Eight couples!”, I realized. And each one has indicated that they will be there. No declines. Guests, plus hubby and me makes 18 adults. And as it turns out, we average two kids per couple - 18 adults + 18 children, all in our house. This is where I wish my kids were born in summer so we could spread out into the yard. But it’s winter and we are stuck indoors.
I won’t bore you with details, but with the help of a friend who stayed over before the party preparing meat pie, chicken, fish, goat meat, shaki and the various parts of meats Nigerians love to eat, we were able to put out a decent spread. She saw to the jollof rice and fried rice while I attended to minor details like fixing Darling Angel’s hair and picking up the birthday cake. What would I have done without her help? I had made carrot cake the night from a recipe I found online - simple with great results.
The party wasn’t perfect. The special party mix CD I had painstakingly put together had mysteriously disappeared. Darling Angel had taken it up to her room to listen to, and tossed it ’somewhere’ when she was done. ‘Somewhere’ is yet to be discovered. Hubby had graciously cleaned up the living room leaving no CD in sight. My desperate foraging in Darling Angel’s room unearthered fingerprinted and scratched CDs that hurt our guests ears whenever they hit a bump. “Put that thing off”, Hubby called out. But I would hit the skip forward button, hoping we had hit the last bump. After being wrong again and again, I gave up and put the thing off.
Conversation flowed among the adults, the kids screeched and screamed while they played with balloons. The two oldest kids (older than seven) may have been a tad bored though. One asked if there were any games. Baby Brother was clueless that the event was for him. But he’s a social one and seemed comfortable with the crowd and noise. He cruised around scooping food from unattended plates into his mouth. Hubby was mortified and a bit embarrassed and kept trying to feed the boy to eliminate any hunger.
We couldn’t get a decent photo of the birthday boy and his birthday cake as he was all poised to scoop the cake into his mouth. Perhaps I should have let him have the smash cake but somehow, the image of him digging into all that icing turns my stomach. The smash cake still sits on the kitchen counter.
Adding the rest of the kids to the picture was even worse as almost every single one of them wanted to dig their fingers into the cake. One four year old was nice enough to ask “Can I stick my finger in the cake please?”. Photo attempt was quickly abandoned.
Despite the glitches and the enormous effort that went into preparing, we were happy with the outcome. Cleaning up, amazingly enough, wasn’t so bad. There were no spilled drinks and only one or two carpet stains to remove. I call that SUCCESS.
