The Aftermath

Wow – the chaos of our eldest son’s 7th birthday weekend needs to be described to be believed.

We were dragged kicking and screaming out of a deep sleep at 5.40am on Saturday morning by Josh and Max crashing unceremoniously into our room.  Unfortunately I read my watch wrong and thought it was twenty to seven, but they were so excited that I thought they may self-combust if we sent them back to bed, so we came downstairs.

Bedlam quickly ensued as they began to fight immediately over cards and presents, Max not understanding why nothing was for him.  An incredibly noisy, light up, remote control car was the toy of the hour and the puppy chasing it and barking frantically woke up our youngest, whose screaming completed the cacophony.

We got dressed and Eric took Josh to football to try to run off some excess energy, whilst I sorted the food for the party (dumping stuff from plastic cartons onto platters) and the other two had a sleep.  Then everyone piled into the car and we set off.

The party was at Josh’s Ju Jitsu club and consisted of twenty kids stampeding around playing games and basically making as much noise as is humanly possible, stopping only briefly to shovel some grub into their mouths before carrying on.

Three o’clock arrived and we realised that the cutting of the cake (with a samurai sword) hadn’t been done, so there was a mad scramble to do that as the parents sat waiting patiently.  I hurriedly stuffed ridiculously unequal pieces of cake into party bags and Josh played ‘catch the child before they leave’ to distribute them.

We arrived home and Josh launched himself at his presents; we had to virtually restrain him as we tried to keep a note of who had bought what.

I spent the next fifteen minutes sending thank you texts to all the parents and then took Pepper for the fastest walk of her life in the rain, actually jogging for part of it, with my coat flapping open (thanks to her chewing the zip off) and water dripping off my nose.

We got back just in time to pile three tired, overexcited children back into the car to go out for tea with the family and at this point in the proceedings we were both so desperate for alcohol that Eric and I actually played ‘paper, scissors, stone’ to see who was going to drive back.  As I won the best out of three, Eric resorted to bribery, offering to pay me to drive, but there was no contest.

We spent the next two hours calming down children who had had too much sugar, following an escapee toddler round the restaurant and helping pre-schoolers to actually get at least some Spaghetti Carbonara in their mouths rather than just on their clothes.

We arrived back, brushed teeth and got them to bed.  After two hours of down time we retired to bed ourselves, only to be woken at half three by Max projectile vomiting all over his wall and floor (probably from a combination of excitement, over-tiredness and too many e numbers).  Being exhausted and full from rich food almost almost resulted in Eric and I having our very own ‘Barf-O-Rama’, like this one from Stand By Me…

 

…but we managed to contain it and clean up before collapsing back into bed.

Yesterday we let Josh loose on Toys-R-Us to spend his birthday money and got back just as my family arrived for tea.  Five children took it in turns to have meltdowns for three and a half hours whilst the adults counted down until bedtime.

Kids’ birthdays are fun, aren’t they?  Can hardly wait for the next one… 🙂