Elliot Has A Birthday Party

Elliot turned six today. He’s pretty excited about it. I was pushed into an existential crisis, just like last time he had a birthday.

“Didn’t you just have one?!” I asked in disbelief. The birthday parties are starting to blur together. I’ll be dead and gone faster than I can sneeze. Our lives are described as a vapor in the Bible. Sounds about right. But I’m not dead quite yet. It was time for a birthday party!

The mistake a lot of parents make is to throw extravagant birthday parties for their little kids. The problem is that once you do it, the child expects the next birthday party to be at least that good, if not better. This means you have to outdo yourself or risk disappointing your now spoiled child. Spoiled children don’t take disappointment well. Even normal children don’t. So, what you want to do is start out small and establish that as the benchmark. As they get older, slowly increase the effort you put into each party so that it reaches a crescendo at like sixteen or eighteen, pushing them out of the nest with a flourish. After that, they’re free to throw as big of a party as their own paychecks will allow.

Many parents reach the crescendo stage long before the child is ready to leave the nest, forcing them into an unsustainable frenzy of rent-a-clowns, bounce castles, and over-inflated egos.

With this in mind, we wanted to make the day special, but not too special, because we still have ten or twelve birthday parties to go.

Also, since we’re in Papua New Guinea (a tropical island just above Australia), the ingredients for an over-the-top American birthday party are unavailable anyway. Shoot, the older generations here don’t even know when their birthdays are, let alone think they’re special for having one. This is why they traditionally count their age by how many Christmas’s they’ve lived. This blows our American minds that no one would bother writing down the date on which their children entered the world. How else are they to receive gifts, attention, and grand acts of acknowledgment every year?

Because birthday celebrations are just catching on here and not yet up to American standards, we have to custom build our own birthday parties.

Janice is good at that. She made seventy cupcakes. I don’t know why. She didn’t either. She just doubled the recipe and kept going until all the batter was used. Then we ordered pizza from the local restaurant (there are two places in town that make some form of pizza) and bought four tubs of Australian imported ice cream. I grabbed a bundle of firewood from the market. We invited some other people to eat our food. The party was on!

We had it at Wom Beach, our favorite destination here in Wewak. Sure, we paid several Kina to use the beach but it’s still cheaper than Chuck-E-Cheese or some chlorinated swimming pool with screeching lifeguards. Plus, here we occasionally get stung by a jelly fish or get bitten by sand fleas, which are character building events that help us remember our place in the world. At least that’s what I tell Elliot when it happens. He seems to get stung by jelly fish the most often, for some reason. Janice tells me not to lecture our kids when they’re screaming in pain, though I think painful events hit the “Save” button in our brains, thus helping us remember it next time. That’s why I cram in as much advice as I can when my kids are experiencing some sort of trauma. Sometimes I smack them just so I can give them wisdom to remember.

But today wasn’t one of those days. The day was beautiful. Elliot and I went out for breakfast then went on a motorcycle ride around the peninsula. The clouds were puffy and white. The ocean was as warm as bathwater. The waves were gentle and lapped the beach like a nuzzling puppy. And the jelly fish didn’t sting anybody, not even Elliot. Elliot opened a few presents, all of which he was pleased with. I wasn’t so much, knowing that they all have to be packed up because we’re going on furlough in a week. Also, there was some strange icy goo off the top of the ice cream, but the stuff underneath did a good impersonation of what vanilla ice cream typically tastes like. The cupcakes were delicious.

“This is the best birthday I ever had,” said Elliot. I couldn’t help but smile, even though the party turned out pretty good and now he’ll expect the next birthday to be even better.

Oh well. Good memories are worth something too.