Surviving the modern birthday party

After our daughter's birthday party on the weekend, we were left with a strange feeling of euphoria. 

We had done it... again. 

We had managed a five-and-a-half-hour birthday party, with no one visibly injured in the process. 

We've had a child choke before, but thankfully no intervention was required. The situation alleviated itself, albeit with some spitting up of birthday party food on the birthday party table. 

Emotional distress is also an issue, with the risk further heightened when birthday parties are attended in rapid succession. One of our attendees came straight from a sleepover party. She could barely stand up straight. For her birthday card, she managed to scribble a three-word greeting on the front of a folded piece of paper. Who needs a signature anyway? There was $30 cash included, and that's all that really mattered. 

Like many parents, we struggle with birthday party inflation. There was a time when a five-dollar gift was appropriate. Now it's at least $20 per child.  
I remember the days when our daughter was quite involved in the birthday party circuit. With over 25 kids in her class, it was nearly a bi-weekly affair. And at $20 a pop, it started to add up. 

Fortunately for parents, birthday party deflation is also at work – the older your child, generally, the fewer kids that get invited. For our daughter's 11th birthday, that number was down to five. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the cost born by the parents declines. 

"Kids are spoiled these days," we might say, forgetting that as adults we aren't much different. The average cost of a wedding in Canada is now $30,000. Now to be fair, this is a much more remarkable/memorable day than a kid's birthday party. But I would guess the average birthday party is 1% of that cost at $300 a pop. Even with four kids, over time you'll maybe hit the $10,000 mark when all is said and done. You'll even save if a couple of your kids were born within the same month. 

Depends if you hire a clown, of course. Clowns strike me as being expensive... and creepy. 

Today's trend is to rent a facility far away from home. It's a quick fix. We tried it last year and quite enjoyed the maintenance-free aspect. Thankfully, we had a gift card help to help us with the expense, but with food and goody bags all in, for the first time we were nearing that $300 mark. 

Fortunately for us, it was not to be repeated this year. No, this year's events had to be original. It also had to top the last birthday party my daughter attended, where her friend's parents managed to book the entire pool at a police training facility (I'm told one must have connections). 

My daughter's party involved the novel idea of going to the beach – a 40-minute drive from home. It also involved some canoeing, a modest hot dog lunch, and a visit to the local ice-cream shop. 

It should have run like a well-oiled birthday machine, but here's another thing about birthdays: not everything goes as planned. Twenty minutes into our beach party, a small thunderstorm arrived, forcing us to abandon the freezing cold lake. Our saving grace was that girls in grade five still call this kind of thing an adventure. 

In the end, we got to do everything we planned and were able to call it a day five-and-a-half hours later (did I mention that already?) I think we set a new record for birthday party duration. 

The kids' parents, our friends (thanks to the many birthday parties), appreciate us for setting a new precedent. They will have something to top in grade six.  

I'm also reminded that grade six, based on my personal experience, was when boys started to be invited back to the parties.

Please, no. 

Birthday fun at the beach?

I wrote a "book"

Every aspiring writer thinks they have a good book in them. It's a line that drives true novelists nuts. Because until you try, you'll never know how excruciatingly painful it can be. And in the end, it may not be good at all. It may, to put it bluntly, quite simply suck. 

Writing a novel is like renovating a bathroom for the first time – it feels like you'll never be done. And when you are, you still feel like it's incomplete. Like you've just wasted a year making something that people might think is garbage. 

Novelists like John Grisham and Stephen King are anomalies. They are the one in a million. They churn out stories like spaghetti through a pasta maker (similes are great, but being original can be a challenge).  

I tried to follow the writing formula as outlined by Stephen King in his autobiography, On Writing, of which, he admits, there really is none. Write about something you know, he told me. (He didn't really tell me, but in a strange way, it felt like he was whispering creepily into my ear). Write about work. People love to read about work, according to Mr. King. Tell a story. Don't get bogged down in research or the details. 

It's really quite easy. Until you begin. Or get half-way done.  

That was the toughest part for me. I got hung up in the middle. Writer's block, or whatever you want to call it, I ran out of ideas. 

Even the best writers struggle. Stephen King had writer's block halfway through one of his more prominent novels, The Stand. But then he had the brilliant idea of blowing some people up with a bomb and, voila!, his book became a bestseller.  

It's so easy when you're a writer of horror. I was writing about a government meeting on climate change.... Pique your interest at all? 

If you do want a copy, I will hesitantly give it to you. Along with some qualifiers, like I was very tired when writing, and I'm really not into writing fiction, and I was just doing it for fun – if I had been serious about publishing, I would have spent more time on it.... blah, blah, blah. 

You get my point. I'm very defensive about my writing, like any good writer (that's a joke). But sometimes it is the bad writers who think they're the next Charles Dickens. In some cases, they're the ones who get the multi-million-dollar movie contracts. 

Have you ever read The Hunger Games? I mean, actually read the book? I understand if you haven't – this is more of a teenaged sci-fi horror genre, an exclusive club that includes some forty-year-olds. As interesting as the plot is, this book reads like a movie screenplay. It made me want to put down the book and watch the movie first. (It usually is the other way around.) Good on her, though. She made tons of money – something every novelist desires but rarely accomplishes. 

I would love to write a book that makes it to the big screen. Even the little screen would be fine. CBC, even. I'm not at all being full of myself when suggesting my little piece of fiction has all the literary qualities suitable for CBC daytime programming.  

It's so much easier to blame it on the acting.... 

The writing, on the other hand? Hmmm.... Do you how many times I struggled with whether to add, "he said" after a quote? I mean, what's the rule on that? And how much description should one have when two people are talking? Does a reader really care about the colour of a dude's hair? And then there's the plot... How does one continually think up things for people to do or say? So many times I wanted to resort to Mr. King's answer and just blow people up. 

 By now, you're probably wondering what I wrote about. Well, I wrote about work. I wrote about love. I wrote about a goofy, unlikely hero. All the classic elements of a CBC melodrama. There are even a few bathroom scenes – no, not bedroom – bathroom. I tried to keep the rating PG-13. 

But in the end, my main goal was to finish. And I did. 

And after a one-year hiatus, a sequel is now officially in the works. The pain has already begun.