My daughter’s birthday is in May. I don’t know if it’s the optimism of spring or the natural receptive magnetism of being a Taurus but I feel like her birthday always rules. Great weather. Great gifts. Great life.
But this year it was pouring rain. We had to move her party indoors instead of having it at the park. I’d already invited all 31 classmates. I didn’t want to postpone because nailing down dates with busy 7-year-olds is like trying to schedule an international business conference – everyone’s got other places to be pillaging. I could walk you through the nuanced logistics of kid RSVP’s, drop-off and sibling policies, but what if you die in the next five minutes and that was the last thing you’d read. Bored to death. Basically children’s birthday parties are like everything else about having kids – impossible to predict and requiring lots of effort. So, I resigned myself to hosting a vaguely large amount of people in my home.
Hosting events gives me anxiety. I combat this anxiety by mentally over-preparing. Then I combat the anxiety of over-preparing with a secondary plan to "keep it casual.” The result is a carefully planned casualness that lets everyone know I’m totally cool with having people over and this is fun. I should mention that for years we were too exhausted to plan non-family birthday parties for either of our kids, which I have no regrets about. Now my kids are at the “I will remember this” stage of childhood, I’m no longer feeding either of them from my body, and my mental capacity to track down paper plates has vastly improved. I can handle this. Sort of.
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