Happy birthday!

Kids' parties and how to survive them

Dear friends,

I did it, this year I did it! What is she talking about? Birthday parties for kids, organizing the thing and actually surviving it as well.

I have to admit that last year, haunted by the memory of birthday party 2006 with kids climbing up the curtains/walls sprayed with red juice/ couches padded with chips, carpets stampeded with chocolate cake/the screams of my eldest daughter being mauled by one of her invitees (a bad loser in one of the party games)… all of this meant that I couldn’t muster the courage to organize even one single birthday party in 2007. I figured that since my daughters couldn’t read calendars yet, I could keep telling them that their birthday
hadn’t come yet. And so a year went by filled with nearly every weekend birthday parties of their classmates and friends, but their own was always ‘just a few months’ away. The way they swallowed it, I have to say that I was rather proud of my achievement.

But of course, this could not go on indefinitely, especially since their ‘imminent’ birthday became a daily topic at the breakfast table and their demands in the way they wanted it organized, was growing at an alarming rate.
So last weekend Niko turned six. I had to do something, despite my bad memories and despite the magnificent demands a birthday party over here poses. Because one would imagine that in Africa one can get away with a simple gathering of kids, maybe some musical chairs, some juice and a slice of cake.

Not so! Birthdays seem to be the mother’s preferred way to show off their house, exquisite clothes, flashy car and string of jeweled aunties and uncles. That’s the African middle class, with a big banquet under a canopy in the lush garden and all their friends and family dropping by for a bite and a drink, their necks heavy with golden chains. In the poorer quarters the family and friends will be heaped together inside a tiny room, the guests of honor on the couch (still in its plastic covering), while a TV is blaring away. With expats, especially the Indian community, birthday parties come with a cast of clowns, fairies and here and there a batman or Cinderella thrown in to amuse the kids with games and dances. Then there’s the banquet for all the guests, a cake in the shape of snow white and at the end of the party there’s a gift for each kid to take home – which is another item of huge competition amongst the mothers; these days the take-home gift is often more expensive than the one you came with.

As I had to do something, I ordered dutifully whatever Niko wanted: a clown, a witch and a fairy who would put make-up on all the kids and entertain them with song, dance and a puppet show. I also ordered a cake the size of our apartment, bought enough drinks to fill a lake, got a cook to prepare snacks, got another one to serve it, got two nannies to do crowd control in case the clown or fairy got a nervous breakdown, and I invited all her friends that I knew and gave her another bunch of invitations to invite all the ones I didn’t know.

The party was to be held on Saturday, in the garden for the kids and upstairs for the parents, which meant that I spend another morning cleaning out the living room and making the flat representable, hiding Remi’s anti-fleas shampoo etc. Then I asked everyone to pray that it wouldn’t rain, because in order to avoid the 2006 scenario, kids had to stay in the garden.
Meanwhile, up in Bouake, the ex-rebel fief where Kamiel is, unfortunately, still based, trouble was brewing with some disgruntled ex-rebels who want their slice of the cake, or else…. So they had held the town captive for a couple of days and were threatening to do so again, to put all movement in and out of Bouake on hold till Monday morning. So there Kamiel was, stuck in Bouake. I told my friends to start praying even more.

‘Dieu est grand’, as they say over here, because the weather was perfect (a bit overcast so scorching sun, but dry all the same), the kids enjoyed the entertainment, the parents behaved as well, the cake was gone in a minute, I haven’t received any report of food poisoning yet, and, best of all, Kamiel made it in time to the party (don’t ask me how he did that), and, what’s more, I now even feel like I could do this again, in a month’s time, when Niko’s sister, Remi, will turn four!