Drowning in a sea of cupcakes

It went in a blue cupcake.  And it came out a blue... well... you can fill in the details.  It was some scifi sh... Yeah.

Edie just got invited to a birthday party.  Another birthday party.  And now that she is in preschool, there will be another, and another, and another.  We were told (warned?) before moving here that Nashville was a friendly place.  And in the sense that people intended it, that is certainly true.  Strangers are wont to chat you up, or holler "that's a cute baby you've got!" from across the street.  But in a sense that we didn't fully expect, we've found ourselves in a genuinely open-hearted community where we've made more friends in the last year than ... ever?  Yeah.  Ever.  We selected our neighborhood carefully for a place where we'd fit in (Google terms: over-educated + sort of hippies + babies + enough money but not a lot of money + Tennessee = East Nashville).  And while East Nashville is delightfully nonhomogenous, we've generally fit in well. 

You see, the hub and I met when we were 18.  In the dormitories of the University of Michigan.  Me, a native Michigander who did a terrible job ranking dorm preferences so I ended up stuck in North Campus in the engineering/music school-dominated abodes.  He, a math and circuits loving Iowan with hair that covered his eyes and just a rocking hemp necklace.  It wasn't love at first sight (he had to pretty much work his way through every friend, roommate, and relative I had before he settled on me), but we were attached at the hip from early on.  And by junior year, there were bells, on the hill, and we finally heard them ringing, etc. Since then, we have lived in no less than ten (TEN!) separate abodes, in three states, and two countries.  We are each other's constant.  And thus, even more than your typical married couple as best friends, we have often been each other's only and best friends.  This whole having lots of friends thing is new territory. (One day, after several people had stopped to say hello to me in Will's presence, he looked at me with narrowed eyes and said "You're really popular." in a tone that connoted his willingness to go to the police if I were in fact now a meth dealer.)

In keeping with my comfort zone of not knowing anyone, I even resisted joining a neighborhood moms club for the first several months I was here.  The cost of joining was twenty dollars.  The personal obligation was nothing.  But the idea that I would just meet a bunch of people that I would like enough to want to spend time with so easily seemed absurd.  So I wrote them off as some type of Stepford sorority for awhile and just be'd by myself.  It took me a long time to find a (comfortably) small handful of awesome moms/friends in Germany and it had been sad to leave them and exhausting to think of starting over.  Mostly for the two year old's amusement, I joined last February, and now I am stuck with a massive amount of friends among truly some of the best folks I've had the pleasure of knowing.  It's a real burden.

And these people we've met and confoundingly like a lot? They've pretty much all got kids.  Oh, and here's the kicker: I genuinely like their kids, too! And I don't just like all kids.  Seriously. I mean I love them all because they are children and humans and therefore deserving of love.  But, like them all? Notsomuch.  The kids of these great people, though, are these cool, funny, darling children.  But every last one has a birthday.

Edie has never had a birthday party.  Her birthday has been celebrated in low-key family ways.  There have been desserts and a couple gifts.  Last year, the grandparents came down and we all trekked to the playground down the street.  And that's been great.  But she's wise to the whole thing now.  When's my birfday, momma? It's my birfday soon, mommy! I will have a party! Your birthday is in January, child. That is not soon at all.  And who, pray tell, is throwing you this party?

And now we've got another kid.  And unless I start really offending people (because offending them a little is clearly not enough to make them write me off, according to my field research), he is going to get invited to birthday parties.  We are talking roughly one a weekend until I am old and grey - presuming that my birthday bash lifestyle makes me old and grey over the course of the next decade.

I am not proposing that we stop birthday parties.  I must concede that the parties themselves are in realm of delightful.  Just feeling like I am on the edge of jumping into a balloon-filled rabbit hole.  And before I do - because even me and my heart o' stone will - I am taking a look behind me.  To the lazy Saturdays of getting brunch with Will at I don't even know what time because my life used to not be ruled by the iron fist of naptimes.  To the simplicity of sending a birthday card that I carefully selected from a bookstore where I spent awhile perusing, instead of mass ordering birthday presents from Amazon Prime because my children will eat my soul if I take them on too many errands.  Days when I looked in the mirror for more than just to check for lettuce in my teeth and then to scowl at my weird hairdo or puffy eyes. 

And Will and I do still enjoy the benefit of our ease together from almost eight years as a couple before we had kids, and the shared history of so many new starts made hand-in-hand.  Well, I still enjoy the benefits, anyways.  I have learned over the years to amuse myself wildly by teasing Will about absurd things.  I did a killer monologue pretending to be him ordering dinner alone at a Subway the other day. I was in stitches, I tell you.  Friends? We didn't need no stinking friends!


But we've got friends in spades now, and it's time to pay the birthday piper.  Bring on the sugar highs and lows, because we're here to party.