Birthday Season

Birthday season is in full swing in our house. All the humans who live here turn another year older during a stretch of five weeks. And from the first week of January to the last week of February, if you add only the local members of our extended family into the mix, we have nine birthdays. That’s a lot of cake. And a lot of reflecting on the passage of time.  

This stretch of winter weeks used to entail lots of time spent baking (and frosting and eating) cupcakes, wrapping presents, and planning parties for little people. Recently, I came across decade-old photos from a dinosaur-themed birthday party, including some pictures of dino-masked preschoolers playing Pin the Tail on the T-Rex. The birthday honorees in those photos are now mere months away from having their drivers permits. Gulp. 

 

For a year after my youngest was born, I could claim I had three kids under the age of 3. It was a statement that was partly prideful (as in, “I don’t know how, but I am doing this!”), but also partly oh-my-gawd-help-me! Now that I’m about to have three teenagers in the house, I feel the same way. I am so proud of these humans my husband and I are raising. And I am so challenged by raising them. 

 

Early in my parenting career I realized, often in moments of panic, that I had no idea what I was doing. This parenting thing, it’s no joke. And sometimes it’s wicked hard. What if I did something that totally messed up these children I had born and am responsible for growing into adulthood? Fifteen years into being a mom, that feeling lingers, sometimes just a distant internal hum, other times an anxiety-laden roar.

 

When the kids were little and I’d be out with them – at the playground or in the grocery store, with all three loaded into the cart – well-meaning parents of much older children (or grandchildren) would smile wistfully and tell me to “enjoy every moment.” And, like parents of small children everywhere, I’d smile politely while silently calculating how many nights in the past month I’d slept for more than four consecutive hours and wondering if I should truly enjoy EVERY moment, including the ones occupied by diaper blowouts, toddler temper tantrums, and middle-of-the-night projectile vomiting.

 

But even then, I knew my babies would grow faster than I was prepared for. The sweetness of those baby and toddler stages – and of just about every stage since – trumped all the not-so-sweet stuff. I have tried, all along the way, to cherish the best moments, even the ones – or maybe especially the ones – comprising such normalcy as a 6-year-old holding my hand as we walked down the road or a teenager skunking me in a game of cribbage. I have made it a conscious habit to NOT wish time away. And, still, the time keeps flying by. 

 

These past few years, I’ve discovered that no one ever tells a mom of teenagers to “enjoy every moment.” But those more seasoned parents will often share a quiet look of sympathetic understanding or some vague words of encouragement. With my friends who are also parenting teens, I lament adolescent angst and eye-rolling attitudes – along with the realization that too soon these kids who can sometimes cause us so much consternation will be out of the house and onto their next stage – one that doesn’t involve hand-holding walks (at least not with Mom), after-dinner family games, homework help, or curfews.  

 

So I strive to continue to hold onto those best moments, even in the midst of the not-so-fun ones. I cherish those rare afternoon ski runs with a kid or three. Or when one of them hugs me and holds on just an extra second or two. Or when they share stories from their day, and I get a little glimpse into those worlds that are more and more separate from mine all the time. I know other parents of teenagers cherish these moments, too, because we sometimes talk about the wonder of that stolen time with our kids, who so often these days are at school or at work or off with their friends or hidden away in their rooms doing homework – or just avoiding their parents. 

 

And at least during Birthday Season, I know these teenagers of mine will emerge from their rooms once in a while. After all, there’s lots of cake to be eaten this time of year.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's February 3, 2022 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Cake

I think it was the unicorn cake that did me in. Or maybe the one fashioned to look something like our cat Feargus. Really, it was most likely the sheer number of celebratory confections I made each year in a short window of time during those preschool and early elementary years. Cupcakes for classmates at school, more cupcakes for parties with friends, cakes for family celebrations.

We barely make it through the winter holidays before we dive headlong into birthday season here. All

five of us – just the McPhauls living under this one roof – have birthdays within the span of 34 days. Add birthdays for a grandmother, an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin – all living locally – within a couple weeks of that timeframe, and it makes for a lot of birthdays. And a lot of cake.

In those early kid birthday years, I carefully crafted pretty cakes. At least as pretty as I could make them. Everything was from scratch. The frosting was piped to perfection. Hours were spent on each creation. This morning-person mama sometimes stayed up far too late to make sure the cakes were ready for the next day – because who has time during the daylight hours to decorate cakes with toddlers running around needing attention all the time?!?

There was the train cake, carefully assembled from an array of specially shaped mini cakes. There was the simpler pond cake – round and blue-frosted with green lily pads and rubber ducky candles. There was a rabbit cake for my bunny-loving girl and a tractor cake for my John Deere-obsessed boy. There were snowman and soccer ball and pink puppy cakes. There were dinosaur cupcakes and butterfly cupcakes and panda bear cupcakes with Junior Mint noses and chocolate chip eyes.

And then there was the unicorn. That cake involved a rocking horse-shaped cake pan, a meticulously frosted ice cream cone horn adhered to the cake with icing and covered in glittery sprinkles, and different-colored strands of frosting comprising the mane and tail. That unicorn was my pièce de résistance, my crowning glory in cake making.

It certainly wouldn’t have won any prizes on Cake Wars, but my four-year-old loved it.

Since that creation, I’ve knocked my cake-making endeavors down several notches. One year we even had a no-cake birthday season. We spent the day of two birthdays (my twins’) in Boston and had gelato for dessert at Quincy Market. We were in Disney World – a whole different sort of chaos – for the littlest’s birthday.

Mostly, though, we just keep the cakes simple.

The birthday kids get to choose the flavor (box mix) and the color of frosting (always homemade) and select a traditional-shaped cake pan. The number of candles lit corresponds to the birthday year. “Happy Birthday” is sung with gusto by people who love them. Their happy faces still glow in the light of those little candles as they make birthday wishes before blowing out the flames.

Simple is still delicious. And with so many of us turning another year older this month, there is always plenty of cake to go around. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 25, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Birthday Parties

Throwing birthday parties is not my forte. Don’t get me wrong – I love birthdays and celebrating them. I enjoy a candle-bedecked cake as much as the next person, and for years I made the kids whatever shape they wanted, although the unicorn nearly did me in. But in this Pinterest-savvy world, I am like the anti-Pinterest. I don’t do well with themed decorations and clever party games and perfectly assembled goodie bags for every guest.

Some parents don’t think twice about hosting a houseful of kids hyped up on sugar and toting noise-makers, but the thought of such a scene puts me on the edge of an anxiety attack. Maybe if we could spread the birthday planning out a bit, it would be OK. But all three of our kids have birthdays within a month, which ups the party planning anxiety.

When my oldest two children were in kindergarten, we threw them a birthday party. The invitee list included the kids’ entire school class – all 12 of them – plus a few other friends. We planned an outside party, because at the mere thought of 15 children under the age of 7 running around my house I felt a colossal headache coming on.

An outside party in January can be tough to pull off, but we went for it anyway. We told the kids to bring sleds. I filled plastic spray bottles with colored water for making snow art. My husband built a fire in the backyard fire pit. He mixed cocoa for the kids and added a little shot of courage to the parents’ mugs. We all stood outside and watched the kids tumble around in the snow.

All was well – until it was time to go inside for cupcakes and presents. That headache I’d felt waiting to attack arrived quickly. Fifteen small kids – and many of their parents – in one living room is noisy. Add the excitement of wrapped presents and the promise of cake, and the noise becomes pure chaos. But the noise was just the tip of the birthday iceberg.

At one point, I glanced over to the window seat table and saw one little girl with a bowl full of nuts sitting next to another little girl who has a severe nut allergy. We quickly separated the two and breathed a sigh of relief. A few minutes later, I looked out that picture window to see one of the more intrepid 5-year-olds down by the (now extinguished) fire pit, hacking away at a log with the hatchet we’d inadvertently left unattended.

It’s a wonder no one went into anaphylactic shock or lost a finger at that birthday party.

That was not the first birthday party we’d hosted, but it was the last one with more than six kids in our house at one time. After that, we did a couple of years of small celebrations, with the kids picking a few friends to join them on a special outing of their choosing. One year, in an effort to go big, but not in my own house, I coughed up a couple hundred bucks and had a party at a big gym. The next year we had a family birthday weekend in Boston instead. I figured that cost about the same as renting a party place. Plus, birthday dinner at Quincy Market was a fun novelty.

The last couple of years, we’ve stuck to birthday treats shared with classmates at school and low-key family dinners. The kids don’t seem to mind – or even notice. Maybe it’s because they’re a bit older now – two reached, by their own definition, pre-teen status this week, whatever that means – and they realize the value of quality celebrating over quantity. Or maybe it’s because with so many local family members, the birthday dinner becomes a big, intergenerational bash – just as much party, not as much stress.

This week we gathered all the people who love my kids best into our home. There were a few presents, and only one adorable 5-year-old. We ordered take-out pizza. The cakes were of standard size and shape. There was no theme, no goodie bags, and certainly no hatchets involved.

It was just the right kind of birthday party.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 12, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.