Birthday Boys

After years of elaborate Scooby Doo parties, haunted house parties, Harry Potter parties, etc. Jordy and I have tried for two years to host a "simple" birthday for Duncan.

Last year's simple plan:  Invite a small group (5 max) of buddies to a sushi lunch in Manhattan. Last year's reality:  Eight boys (=5 guests + our 3) take the first F train to pass under the East River after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel (slightly nerve-wracking) to Rockefeller Center (crowded, hectic, the usual) where frolicking and revelry at the Nintendo Store leads to frolicking and revelry at the Lego Store a leads to sushi-rolling lessons at Ruby Foo's, capped off by candy bonanza at Toys-R-Us in (shoot me now) Times Square.  By Party's End, Jordy and I collapsed like sheepdogs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wall-eyed with tongues draped from the sides of our mouths.

This year's party, whatever it was, would be in one place.  Duncan made the plan:  Invite the 6 boys in his 3rd grade class here in Cornish, NH to a sports-themed sleepover.  First, football, then chess. Dinner, presents, cake & a movie.  3 would then go home; the remainder would pull out their sleeping bags and go to sleep.  Easy enough, and dirt cheap by Brooklyn standards.

In bare bones, all went according to plan and a great time was had by all.  But, being 6 + our 3 boys, we contemplated trips to the Emergency Room no fewer than 5 times.

Football.  For the week leading up to the party, Duncan insisted they be allowed to play tackle ball, this after he sustained a near sprain the previous weekend tackling with a buddy on the sidelines at the Dartmouth football game.  Duncan's insistence grew in proportion and sophistication to my objections: Without equipment, it won't be safe, I said.  So he rallied the support of his friends who play on teams to bring their gear.  The conflict culminated in the near cancellation of the party over the tackle issue, at which point Duncan backed off.

But can you really stop a pack of nine-year old boys determined to tackle each other?  Jordy presided over the football while I got burgers ready to grill; on my brief excursion out to take photos, I witnessed a gaggle of bodies, t-shirts off, leaping, lunging, rolling and diving, sometimes into the knotweed after the ball. Duncan came in crying at one point, upset as best I could tell by the lack of compliance with his rules (and maybe just because his own team lost).  Complaints of injuries to an ankle, a leg and a hand were made in the course of events, but all limbs remained attached as we moved inside for chess.

Chess went off without bodily injury, though it came close.  Littlest partier, Tucker (age 3), knocked pieces off a board at some point, I think?, raising an angry ruckus but, to their credit, the third graders restrained themselves and re-started the game.

They actually sat in their chairs, mostly, to eat -- I think they were starved and parched -- but popped up and out as soon as they'd had enough to take the edge off.  We asked everyone to take a seat while Duncan opened his presents.  Fat chance.  They swarmed him, or else jumped on the couches, or else took off their shirts to whip each other.   The presents were, in the birthday boy's summation, "totally awesome."  Fire-vision Nerf football for nighttime play, basketball trinkets from the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lego sets, a Jeter Yankees t-shirt (given by a die-hard Red Sox fan, a true act of love), and -- my personal favorite -- "Sonic Distractors" -- little grenade shaped things you clip to your built, and when distraction is called for, push a red button (which then blinks) and roll into the situation, detonating a random sound effect (dog barking, fire engine, etc.).

How to focus all this energy?  Cake!  We presented the football field cake, with Duncan's name in one end zone and one of his friend's in the other, as they shared the day, with a rousing double chorus of Happy Birthday.  By the time it was served, however, many had already popped out of their chairs again, eager to get out in the dark for FireVision Football.  A few nibbles of cake were eaten and some icing licked; most of it ended up in the trash.  Which was probably just as well... Did they really need more sugar?

We had to cancel FireVision football when two kids came in after a multi-boy pile-up, seeing as it was now pitch black and only 2 of the 9 had the FireVision goggles to see anything.  We settled them in to watch Air Bud, the Disney classic about a boy who finds a dog with preternatural basketball skills.  We had chosen the film carefully, striving for age-appropriateness with no risk of scary imagery that might keep sleepers-over awake.  That morning many of the boys also had their first basketball practice, for some -- such as Duncan -- ever in their lives.  And for our family, the film also touched on the dog theme, salient in the wake of Harpo's death two weeks ago and our adoption that same day of a new rescue dog.  What could go wrong?

It was a total hit:  The boys were remarkably focused.  Our younger two were as captivated as the big boys.  One of the boys was so moved by the dog that he spent most of the movie relating stories to me about his own Siberian Husky.  What an inspired movie choice!  I was so bloody proud of myself.

First Tucker burst into tears.  Then Reeve, his sorrow silent, tears streaming down his face, sobs choked back to the point of not breathing.  "Why did he yeave dat dog!?" Tucker objected.  Then, "All I can think about is Harpo," Reeve whispered.  And, "Why did he leave him like that?"  ("Because he thought if he kept Buddy, the evil clown would come back again to get him again," I explained... "He was trying to give Buddy his freedom, even though it meant he had to give Buddy up himself too..." Narrative logic that held no sway in the hearts of our three- and six-year olds...)

We held each other tight until the State Championship game, at which point Buddy's fate is unknown and the team has to face their arch rival.  So involved had our pack of nine-year olds become that nary a one could stay seated, or reclined.  They stood on the bed in anticipation, leapt with the players on screen, took their shirts off once again to whip each other, screamed with each basket, roared with delight when Buddy appears again on the court to save the day, and lifted the roof off the house at the end when Buddy chooses the boy over the evil clown to be his master.  Not a hint of irony in this group.  Utterly delightful.

In the mayhem, one of the boys rolled off the bed, landing on another's hand with the possibility of a broken bone.  Ice?  Hospital?  "No, I'm OK."  Three of the boys went home, after which the sleepers-over headed out for one last round of FireVision football, followed by wrestling matches in the tent we had set up for sleeping in the living room.

As the clock ticked off the minutes late into the night, Jordy and I watched the outside of the tent, its walls bulged and pulsed with bodies lunging against it, trying to discern the right moment to intervene and precisely where to set the limit.  The limit became clear when one of the boy's blankie turned into a whip yet again (what's up with that behavior?), almost taking out another boy's eye.  Bedtime!!

We determined that sleep would never happen without surveillance, so Jordy set himself up just outside the tent like the NSA, monitoring activity and dictating silence and stillness as needed.  At last, they drifted off, somewhere around 10:30pm.  As we drifted off ourselves, I remarked to Jordy on our good fortune that the clocks would "fall backward" that night -- an extra hour of much needed sleep after an active evening.

But when we heard the first stirrings at 5:51am, now 4:51am, I understood the flaw in my logic. I wanted to threaten no iPad time, anything, to enforce a return to sleep, but Jordy was right -- there was no getting those genies back into their bottles.  And so I closed our door, trying to keep Tucker asleep and abandoning still sleeping Reeve in the tent to his fate.  They whispered, briefly, still under covers. But they couldn't help themselves.  Soon their bodies rose with the noise level, until another full-on wrestling-whipping match was on, and a failure to intervene became unethical.

Solution?  "FOOTBALL!!!"  And so they suited up, at now 5:30am, to go out into the 28-degree perfect blackness to play football.  Minutes later, Duncan comes in, limping and grasping his hip. A few minutes later, another boy comes in:  "I think I have a tick on my penis."  (Sure enough...) And a few minutes after him, the rest race into the house.  "We saw someone out there!!!  A ghost!!" Jordy and I exchange a look.  Only three and a half more hours to go.

The iPad provides diversion, when not inspiring warfare over whose turn it is, and a pancake breakfast fills at least twenty minutes.  As the sun rises, the boys head back out for yet another round of football, but invent instead a vertical version of the game from the deck of the treehouse to the field below, which requires the boys to ascend and descend a challenging rope ladder...

One of the boys comes screaming into the house, "Jordy!  Jordy!  The ladder broke!"  Our blood ran cold as Jordy sprinted out to find the unfortunate fellow on his back, his eyes closed.  We fought panic, brought him in for hot cocoa (no loss of consciousness of apparent inability to move), and got the story of how one of the wooden rungs had snapped and he'd landed on his butt, then back.  (Not his head, he reported.)  Even this hard-scrabble bunch of boys admitted later that seeing their friend fall was "super scary."

We were already on a first-name basis with the triage nurse in the ER, after consulting on the tick, and nearly went in for a personal visit this time, but the boy seemed OK and we called home instead and kept watch.  He complained of a headache, which the boys all shared ("sleep deprivation," we explained), but no other clear pain.  We plugged them into another movie for the remaining 90 minutes, desperate to keep them as physically inert as possible until their parents could reclaim them.

As I scanned their nine-year old faces zoning out to the movie, their ruddy cheeks still a little rounded with the last bit of baby fat, exhausted but still eager, I felt a surge of tender affection for these little men.  In just ten years, they will actually be men.  I imagined this party then -- and realized what we'd survived was something like the movie The Hangover, nine-year-old style.  What a privilege to ride the wild bronco of little boys' birthdays -- no matter how close they bring us to a nervous breakdown.