You know how during December regular life sort of shuts down because everyone is crazy busy buying gifts and planning parties and trying to make the holiday festive for their families?
And you know how every single December you’re never really prepared for just how busy and fun and exhausting all the preparing and shopping and baking and celebrating is?
Our family has the same Celebration Season exactly six months later– at the end of June. With Fathers Day, the twins’ birthday, and M’s birthday all in one week, we’re partying like it’s December.
And, just like December, the busy-ness of it all surprises me every year.
Here’s why: every year I forget that there’s no cutting corners for a twin birthday. Because it’s never just one party, one family dinner, one special breakfast, one round of opening gifts. Even if that’s what I plan, it’s exponentially more festive! more hectic! more emotional! more birthdaylicious! because of the two recipients.
In other words, it’s trickier to make each kid feel special on their birthday because special is relative when the person you’re closest to also feels so special.
In other, other words (that will probably muddy this analogy further), I know why Isaac was the first patriarch who wasn’t a polygamist. Because being a twin daddy meant he’d had his share of trying to make sure two people both felt loved and fulfilled.
Speaking of twin daddies, M gets the December 26 birthday in this ever jumbled metaphor of birthdays and Christmas. He deserves a whole week of birthday celebrating after the preparations for a five-year-old pool party, but we’re all a little celebrated-out by his big day. A little hung-over from binging on cake and loose rules on the double twin birthday.
And I try to make his day special, but I find myself going to bed after wrangling two kids who just celebrated with the toy aisle at Target that their friends brought to the party and declaring, “I’m sleeping until noon tomorrow!”
Then I realize that no, I can’t ask M to wake up at 6 on his birthday to the twins trying to assemble Legos and Barbie cars. Instead, in the midst of all that, M will get some sort of a special day.
And today, June 25, I’ll begin to forget how busy it all was…
until December.
