Maddy's party

Imagine a picnic table, decorated with twisted streamers looping around and balloons bouncing joyfully at the end of brightly colored ribbons. Parents chat pleasantly as the children run back and forth from the park to grab bites of pizza. They laugh and chase each other. Presents are opened. Then everyone gathers around 7 lit candles on a carefully decorated birthday cake. “Happy birthday to yoooooou.”

Wouldn’t that have been nice?

To say Maddy’s party was a success would be overstating it. I wouldn’t say it was a total disaster, Maddy thought it was great, but it certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. First off, we had 25 mile an hour winds. So instead of balloons bobbing sweetly, they were whipping around violently. Jostling for position with each other and tangling themselves around anything that was unfortunate enough to get in their way. It was so windy the chips were blowing out of the bowl! I couldn’t hang up streamers in the traditional way so I just had them taped flatly to the beams of the gazebo. All you could hear was wind whipping past your ears so we could barely even speak to each other. "I'm sorry. What did you say?!" Eating was a challenge because you couldn't put anything down without a heavy weight. So you had to hold your plate down on the table with one hand, and you couldn't put your fork down or it would blow away. My body was sore after 3 hours of leaning into the wind.

And I was slightly over prepared since only one person showed up, out of the 7 invites that went out. I made 6 goodie bags. I had a huge cake, 4 pizzas, 30 drinks, and two bowls of chips. All for one friend. Sigh.

We couldn’t even light Maddy’s candles because it was so windy. We just pretended. She had to blow out unlit candles! So pathetic.