Thirsty Thursday: Birthday parties leave me shaken
"Once you get to the stage where you only need to open the door to their bedrooms just far enough to throw in a few bags of Thai Sweet Chilli Doritos your head begins to clear."
Entertaining wordsmith Sarah McCarthy writes a weekly column for The Southland Tribune called Thirsty Thursday.
THIRSTY THURSDAY 11
Week one of the school holidays and I’ve got a sick wee boy. He’s was so poorly on Saturday that we postponed his birthday party at his request.
I’m not going to lie - I was rolling up my sleeves to begin attempting to turn two Sara Lee cheesecakes into a scene from Ice Age while mentally preparing myself for an afternoon at Jump n Fun so I was inwardly doing the bum dance from Big Brother with glee when he pulled the pin.
I love my children and generally want the best for them but birthday parties leave me shaken, kind of like being in a near-miss car accident, except those heart-stopping few seconds last for three hours and sometimes you have to talk to parents that you don’t know. Just when you think you know who your children’s friends are and have established which mums you can bitch to about being a parent (all of them) and which dads are weird (all of them, all men are weird) and they suddenly announce that their new best friend is Perrier, and Perrier asks for smoked salmon at the party table and will loudly tell your kid that their mummy says a bought cake means your parents don’t love you.
We’ve actually been really lucky with our boys’ pals as they’re generally been a merry band of kids who muck in and love the dog and put up with whichever sibling is tagging along - although one memorable party saw a child say “Gosh that’s a lot of sugar” and I grinned like a maniac and said brightly, “well my dude, it is a birthday party!” instead of saying, “listen to me you little shit” which shows how much I’ve grown as a person.
I used to spend a lot of time making cakes for the boys and finding various ways to avoid fondant until I discovered that the little one adores Sara Lee cheesecakes and the big one has a thing for Freddo Celebration Cakes and so my life has become infinitely better. If you don’t know about Freddo Celebration Cakes hold on to your butts - they are a giant ice cream cake but with no vile frozen cream on top and have tiny chocolate Freddo Frog heads scattered all through them and are worth every single penny.
And while I love a pleasant scroll through Pinterest looking at cute birthday party ideas, in practise they are expensive and pointless and once you get to the stage where you only need to open the door to their bedrooms just far enough to throw in a few bags of Thai Sweet Chilli Doritos your head begins to clear.
We also put an end to party bags several years ago, although every year I lose my nerve and have to be talked down from the ledge. This year I was in town buying glow sticks (I needed them to be DJ at the school disco and my set killed it despite me having to tell off a bunch of boys who thought that I was an easy mark and kept asking me to play songs that anyone could see were full of f-bombs, and having to break the hearts of a group of girls when I said that four Taylor Swift songs was probably enough for one evening) and I had a last-minute panic about party bags and my friend stroked my arm like I was a spooked pony and said “shhh shhhh easy girl shhhh”.
I spent the next two days going cold all over as I imagined Perrier asking for a party bag at the end and me saying “NO! I AM MAKING A MORAL STAND AND AM LEADING THE WAY TO FREEDOM FROM PARTY BAG TYRANNY” while they look at me with disgust and can tell I never went on an OE or to university.