Having intermittent contractions, sitting on the couch in my blue/green dress (what happened to that?) with my sister and debating on if I should go to the hospital. Going to the hospital and being turned away, only to be granted a reprieve by a kind nurse who told me to hang out in the waiting room and see if anything changed…and shortly thereafter things did change indeed and I was in agony. Calling the midwife who tried to talk me out of an epidural. Hours of agony. Pushing taking too long and being way more difficult than with Bobby. Squeezing my eyes tight as he was coming out and the midwife saying, “Hilary, open your eyes, your baby is being born!” And seeing him with his dark hair and eyes looking nothing like Bobby and cradling him and telling him he was going to be his own person and do things his own way. Boy has this been true! Theo is a fierce individualist who, despite his worship of his older brother, never shied away from stating his opinion and being different. I think this is an excellent quality. He’s not a follower. I think this will serve him well in life.
Yesterday’s birthday party went about as I expected - only one kid showed up, and one other to drop a present before heading to another party. Thankfully, it was at a packed and chaotic skating rink, so the boys were off skating the whole time and never really noticed or cared that no one else was there. Theo said it was a great party. So he was unaffected, which was my biggest concern. I, however, am mildly traumatized by it. It’s his first stand-alone party ever, and this is how it went. One and a half kids. I never should have relied on him to just invite who he wanted (he only invited six kids), and I shouldn’t have relied on those kids to pass the invites on to their parents, who I had no way of following up with. But looking back, I don’t know how I could have done it differently; again, I have no way of getting in touch with the parents. He mostly invited kids not in his class, so using the class contact list wouldn’t have helped (I asked the room rep to send it to me but they never did), and even though I gave him a worksheet to ask the kids who hadn’t rsvp’d and make a note if they were coming or not, and they all said they were coming, none of them did. I blame the pandemic. These kids only got part of a year in kindergarten and then were out of school for more than a year, and even for the year after that nobody was socializing or having parties. So all of that important bonding time, getting phone numbers, learning parents’ names, etc, never happened. Bobby on the other hand invited fifteen kids to his party next weekend and I’ve heard from almost all of them that they’re coming. So I’m not sure how to fix this. I don’t know if I can make them have one big party again for at least another year or two…or have Theo do an activity with a few friends rather than try to do a big party. Or try to scramble to get parents’ numbers over the next year. I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell not paying $600 for two kids to skate for a couple of hours ever again, I can tell you that.
To add to the birthday stress, today I did something I’ve never done before which is buy birthday treats for Theo’s whole class. He requested donuts, and I emailed his teacher to ask how it worked. She said I have to get vegan and gluten-free options, and that I should leave them in the school office. So I went to a place that said they had gluten free donuts only to discover that in fact they did not, then sat in the parking lot and called three other places that Yelp says carry gluten free donuts only to discover that none of them do; finally I found an obscure hippie coffee shop that did, but only in weird non-kid friendly flavors like coffee frosted and hibiscus; I bought the least offensive ones I could find and high-tailed it up to the school. When I got to the office they seemed confused by my offering and asked if someone was going to come get them; I said I’d asked the teacher and she said to leave them there. Now I’m second guessing that conversation and am very concerned that the donuts never made it to the classroom. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve pretty much accepted that everything having to do with Theo’s birthday this year is going to be a bit of a fail. Hey, it can’t possibly be worse than 2020 when school closed for covid on his birthday and I made the worst doorstop of a cake for him that night and we all went to bed terrified of the coming plague that would ruin our lives for years to come. Can’t be worse than that…right??
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