birthday Archives - The Dose of Reality

Friendship Is STILL Not Taxing

Posted on April 15, 2013 by The Dose of Reality

First of all, you may notice that things look a different around here today. Yes, we are attempting to redecorate our home away from home, and yes, like with our actual homes we are pretty bad at it. If you notice for the next few days/weeks/months (please God, not months!) that things look strange, stick with us please!

Secondly, as I read back over this post in preparation for surprising Lisa with it today (Happy Birthday Lisa!), it hit me all over again how true the words are. Good girlfriends are hard to find, y’all, and so I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found an amazing friend and now blogging partner in Lisa.

Lisa got a little more of a birthday present than she was bargaining for this weekend when she was struck down by the Dreaded Stomach Bug 2013, so it seems even more fitting that I can take today to tell her how much her friendship means to me…and maybe drop off some Saltines and Ginger Ale on her doorstep! 😉

One thing I will say about tax day that I actually do like, is unlike another April holiday that bounces around from year to year, springing up wherever it wants (I am looking at you Easter), tax day is always April 15th.

Lots of time to prepare and plan and be organized with your forms and your money, or if you are like my husband, you can wait year after year until just about the last possible second and squeak in at the deadline. Whatever, it isn’t like your wife will stress about it or anything.

My real favorite thing about April 15th is that it happens to be the birthday of one of my besties. You know the friends who come along in your lifetime, and you think to yourself, well, even if it means hanging on to the bumper of their minivan while they attempt to drive away, I am NEVER letting this person go. The true friend, nothing fair weather about them at all, pure, honest, good girlfriend through and through.

Now, I am super lucky because I actually have a handful of these kinds of women in my life, some going all the way back to high school and some who came along during the baby mommy phase and then my friend Lisa, who happens to be the subject of this post.

Our girls bonded in Junior Kindergarten, thanks to our clicking and have been besties themselves ever since. I think I have told her this before, but Lisa was the chair of the Lower School Parent’s Association when Emma started school, so I first really noticed her at back-to-school night when she introduced herself. I remember leaning over to Robert that night and saying how totally fantastic she seemed and that I hoped I could get to know her. Lucky for me, I ~~stalked~~ managed to run into her enough places that we struck up a friendship.

She and I talk every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, about everything under the sun. We email so much it is a wonder that we even have anything left to talk about over the phone—but we do! Thank God for unlimited text messaging or my kids could never go to college!

I greatly admire the way she mothers her children and since becoming her friend, I look to her for advice at pretty much every turn because I know that she will tell me the truth, but never in a way that would be hurtful or unkind. She is the validating kind of girlfriend, and I cannot say this enough, if you don’t have those kinds of girlfriends, this marriage and motherhood gig is going to break you.

She makes me laugh to the point that if I was not a regular Kegel practicing mom, I would probably need to hit up Lisa Rinna for some of those Depends. Her emails alone can have me sitting at my computer laughing out loud by myself. Someday, when she is not expecting it and I am not actually trying to give her a non-embarrassing birthday gift, I will totally share some of them here. Ssshhh, don’t tell her, let’s let it be a surprise!

More than all of the good times, though, what makes a true friend, well, true, is how they fare when the weather gets rough in life. How when you can be sitting in an emergency room waiting room on a Sunday night, having just been called by your mother’s nursing home because she was found unresponsive and look up and there is that friend to wait with you. How she can know the deep dark reality of exactly how you feel about your mother, so complicated and overwhelming in the complexity of feelings and emotions, and still a year later take you to lunch on the anniversary of her death armed with cards and candy. Because she knows, she knows, that is exactly what you need.

One of my 2012 goals is to tell the people in my life more often how much I care about them, because, you just never know, right? And because honestly, people should hear that they matter, that what they are doing does not go unnoticed, that their presence in your life is essential. So, today, I choose to say to Lisa…Happy Birthday to one of my favorite people on the planet! I hope you know that you are loved.

P.S. In addition to all the other fabulous things about “Miss Weesa”, as Abby calls her, she proofreads all my blog posts to make sure I don’t do something stupid like leave out a comma or forget a word. Since I obviously couldn’t show her this one, I am having to throw caution to the wind and hope for the best!

Obviously, we all know she still does that and more now that I have threatened her enough with revealing all of her hilarious emails and made her officially join the blog!

Double the Friends, Double the Fun, DOUBLE the Spending?!?

Posted on November 9, 2012 by The Dose of Reality

What is the biggest, best birthday bash you have ever thrown for your child? Tell us about it in the comments!

Here’s a piece of advice for you, my dear friends and readers – don’t even bother with an actual party for your child, at least one that takes place at a location outside of your home and involves more than the grocery store cake and some candles, until age four. The reason has nothing to do with how much you love your child (trust me) and actually not even as much to do with the fact the before the age of four your child won’t remember any of their parties anyway.

Given that my planning personality needed to have birthday parties that were fun and themed ever since Emma’s first year celebration, and now that I have had to plan something different and interesting eight times at this point, I have started to run out of cheap but special ideas and themes. When you started planning the location birthdays when your child is turning two, then by the age of eight you have pretty much been to every single location your town has to offer, and the ones you have not been to yet (Chuck E. Cheese’s) are the ones you avoid like the plague (which is what you will catch if you ever have to go there).

Let’s now jump back to mid-September of this year, when I am on the phone with one of my BFF’s, Lisa, who also happens to be the mother of one of Emma’s BFF’s, Lucy. We are discussing our daughters’ upcoming birthdays, which happen to fall fairly close together on the calendar. Both of us are struggling to come up with ideas that we have not already done or that would not break the bank. The last four words of that sentence will prove to be … that’s right … famous last words.

Emma and Lucy had expressed interest in having a movie theater birthday party, which sounds easy enough, and given that Lucy’s birthday comes first on the calendar, I was naturally willing to have Lisa make the movie theater inquiries. As it turns out, you can definitely have an awesome movie theater birthday party, IF and only IF, you don’t mind waiting until basically about a week before your party to tell your guests what time they will actually need to arrive at said party, since that is when the movie times are announced and there is no way to have any idea more than one week prior to said movie theater party date what showing you will receive. This is no celebrity wedding here, folks, where you send out the invite and they call a special secret phone number to get the location and time; this is just a simple Saturday birthday party at a local cinema for some eight-year-olds. Lisa and I debated how you would even go about wording the invitations, or would we even send invitations at all or just rely on old-fashioned smoke signals and hope for the best. And oh, by the way, all of this comes at a very steep price, so in the end you are handing over gobs of cash to feel extremely unsure and uncomfortable about your child’s birthday party. So we said, “Thanks but no thanks,” and we moved right along.

After tossing around some other ideas that amounted to nothing, I casually threw out the possibility of the pumpkin patch. Emma had been to a Christmas-themed birthday party there while in preschool, when they had winter sleigh rides to see Santa and thought it was fabulous. Once again, Lisa did the calling, as I don’t really “like” people, especially when I have to talk to them on the phone. The good news about our friendship is that having run the car raffle together, we both know our strengths and weaknesses and accept them from each other. She called me back very quickly, sounding quite excited, and said that this was a GENIUS idea. It was totally available the day that we wanted to have the party, and if we did a joint party for the girls, we could include all of their classmates, plus several other friends; and by splitting the cost it would be the “best, least expensive” party ever! Note those last words, again. In fact, given that it was going to be so inexpensive for the location fee, we came up with the fantastic idea to include pony rides … because honestly, what makes a joint birthday party with your BFF even better? … PONIES!

And then the planners in us were off and running! The girls were excited and immediately got to work on the guest list. They came up with the idea very quickly that they wanted to collect items for the Humane Society of Charlotte, rather than have gifts, because they had so many friends in common and they did not want to ask them to bring two presents to the party. Cue the pulling of the heartstrings in Lisa and me. We love our sweet girls so much! By the time we were finished, we had more than 40 children invited to this party, so we realized that we were going to need some serious manpower to handle this many girls running loose in open fields, at the petting zoo, among pumpkins, etc. Fast forward to hiring three high school cheerleaders moonlighting as babysitters for the afternoon of the party and we were feeling much better about parents dropping off their babies with us.

Like everything else that we seem to do together, Lisa and I might have gone a little overboard; but we just kept thinking about the fact that we were going to be splitting it all by two. And because we did it all one expense and party line item at a time, it never seemed TOO crazy, you know? So yeah, we had custom-designed invitations and custom-designed cakes …

… plus arts and crafts so the girls can be creative, which of course required purchasing additional decorative pens and stickers to make the activity even more fun. And then we realized that we needed a way to keep these children in groups so that we would be able to keep track of them with our group leaders and move them from station to station easily. Enter the purchasing of the bandanas. Each group would have their own color. The bandanas made for one more great party favor, and they were only a dollar a piece, which sounds cheap … until you multiply it by the safe number of 50 and then add it to all of the other “minor” expenses.

And then, when actually devising our military-like schedule for the party, it hit us that we did not have as much time as we originally thought for all of our activities.

We became afraid that we might not have enough time for all the girls to get their pony ride, which was of course, totally unacceptable. One phone call (by Lisa, of course) to the pony rental lady later and we were hooked up with a fourth pony. Phew. What was another $75.00, especially when you (say it with me now) think about the fact that we are splitting it all two ways?

In the end, we jokingly said that we managed to throw the David Beckham birthday party, minus the mansion, the catering staff, the bouncy castle and real live ponies … oh wait, no, we had the real live ponies. And bandanas. And a tractor-pulled, rickety-wagon hayride. And we ate at picnic tables under a shelter. There was nary a clown or juggler in sight, yet our final bill resembled that of a small wedding.

Where did we go wrong? I am not actually sure that we did, really; because if we had cut corners and done less, it would not have been the party that we threw … and the party that we threw was the one that created the memories and the moments that our girls will always remember when they think about turning eight.

And I am so pleased that they will have that memory to cherish and keep hold of all the way through their ninth birthday parties which will take place in my garage, on the floor, with Domino’s delivery and some Betty Crocker tubs of frosting. And that’s all.

Math Doesn’t Lie After All

Posted on October 1, 2012 by The Dose of Reality

I’m 43. I’m *totally* fine with that.

No, really…I am. I am one of those women who just doesn’t think much about aging. I didn’t bat an eye when I turned 30 or have a existential crisis at 35. I didn’t even feel like I’d passed a particular milestone when I turned 40. It didn’t phase me a bit. I’m just one of those lucky people who is just not hung up on aging. That’s what I thought until:

Robert, Lucy, and I were driving to Bobby’s football game. Robert asked me if my ankle hurt because he wanted to know if it was going to rain. (Okay, I guess I should interject here that I KNOW that it’s supposed to be only the very old who can tell the weather by their various aches and pains. I always envision a granny rocking on the front porch doing this. But….I broke my ankle a few years back, and I can do it too, despite the fact that I’m only 43. My ankle is actually more accurate at predicting rain than the Acuvue Radar of the local TV station). I told him we were in the clear the next 12-24 hours.

Here’s where it turned dicey for me. I added, “You’re lucky you have a wife who can predict weather for you even though she’s only 43. Most husbands have to wait until their wives are really old for that!”

Robert: Yes, it’s really helpful…but you’re 44.

Me (confidently): No, honey. I’m only 43. I’m not going to be 44 until April.

Robert (wearing a confused expression which indicated he wasn’t sure if I was serious or not—a look I’ve seen many times in our 18 year marriage): Lisa, you’re 44. You’ll be 45 on your next birthday.

Okay…what the hell was going on here? I DO NOT have a thing about age, but this was starting to really tick me off. Plus, by this time he was wearing a stupid bemused grin and looking like he was about to laugh. I’d had enough. I began ticking off the decades on my fingers.

Me: Okay, I was born in 1968 so…’78…’88…’98…2008 (that’s 40 so I began ticking off single years)….2009, 2010, 2011, OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING?????

At this point, I was starting to feel distressed. Robert had a point that the math was working out to make it *seem* like I was 44, but I wasn’t falling for that. I mean, you can use statistics to prove any point you want and THAT is math. So, I turned to Lucy in the back seat. She had her headphones on listening to JB (that’s Justin Bieber for the uninitiated) and hadn’t heard a word we’d been saying.

Me: Lucy, how old am I?

Lucy: Um…you’re 44.

This was getting serious. I was 43, and I KNEW it. Robert probably caught her eye in the rear view mirror and mouthed that answer to her. Lucy loves a good joke. So I did the most logical thing I could think of next. I pulled out my phone and called Ashley. She’d never try to trick me into believing I was a year older than I was. She had my back. I was 100% certain of this.

Ashley: Aren’t you supposed to be at the football game?

Me: We’re almost there. I have a quick question. How old am I?

Ashley (without a moment of hesitation): You’re 44.

Me: OMG…WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THIS BEFORE?

Ashley: Oh, um….because I thought you knew?

Well, that did it. I was definitely 44. FORTY FOUR. Now I have nothing against 44. It’s not a bad age at all. It’s just that I was 43 only a few minutes ago, and now I’m suddenly a whole year older, and it isn’t even my birthday. That’s just HARSH.

As I sat in the bleachers I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Just a few hours ago I was 43 which is practically the same thing as being 40. You’re just barely scratching the surface of your 40s, after all. But now suddenly I was going to be 45 on my next birthday which is practically like being 50. That’s almost old enough to get yourself on the AARP mailing list. So, despite the fact that age doesn’t mean a thing to me, I thought about it all the way home, too. I could hardly even concentrate on my reality TV shows that evening after the kids went to bed. Was I was one of those people who got upset about aging now?

I was still feeling a little out of sorts about the whole thing when I got on the elliptical machine the next morning. I dutifully pressed the start button and waited for the prompts. (You know, the elliptical asks you questions so it can calculate your perfect heart rate and keep you working out in the aerobic zone).

THEN THE BEST THING HAPPENED!!

My elliptical asked me for my age…just like it always does.

Suddenly, I felt my spirits lift. YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, DON’T YOU? All this time I’d been entering 43 for my age and my elliptical had been dutifully calculating and keeping me working out so my heart rate would be in the right range for a 43 year old. BUT I AM 44!!!! A 44 year old heart shouldn’t be working out to the exhausting standards of a 43 year old heart! You guys, I’ve been totally overworking myself!!! I need to be taking it down a notch! SCORE! This was just the incentive boost I needed to embrace my non-birthday related advancing age.

I’m 44. It turns out I’m *totally* fine with that after all!

Friendship Is Not Taxing

Posted on April 15, 2012 by The Dose of Reality

One thing I will say about tax day that I actually do like, is unlike another April holiday that bounces around from year to year, springing up wherever it wants, tax day is always April 15th.