Happy Birthday Sunshine

My eldest son turns eight years old today.
It’s hard to believe that exactly seven years and 364 days ago the husband and I were just ordinary Joes, floating through life without so much as a care. In a heartbeat universes aligned, worlds collided and we became Mum, Dad and son. Forever.
It’s fair to say that we hadn’t the first clue what to do with our new baby boy. For the first few weeks of his life we fumbled through, regularly thinking the child was in mortal peril or broken because he slept too much/slept too little/cried/ or because we let the temperature in the room reach 19c. Then there was that projectile vomiting incident when I thought the child was possessed by the devil and rang the emergency parish priest hotline at Finaghy while the husband rang the doctor on his mobile.
Because I worked nights at the Irish News the boy would frequently stay up till midnight watching back to back Terminator or Lord of the Rings movies with his father. And because I wasn’t there in the evenings to supervise his musical development, the child was also subjected to an unhealthy amount of bad 80s rock music in his infancy which may, or may not, have affected his brain. He will surely recite these points as the reason for his issues when he books himself into counselling in a few years time.
But we’ve got him this far without accidentally killing him or totalling messing up his life, which is a victory in anybody’s eyes.
We’re not throwing a party this year due to the sheer volume of injuries that marred last year’s shenanigans.
As I sat in the ruins of a deflated bouncy castle I vowed never again to torture myself by inviting 35 seven year olds into my home.
Seven people had black eyes, two had bumped heads, one was a suspected concussion. Two girls got chewing gum stuck in their hair, one child had to wear a pirate’s patch on their eye for days after taking a direct hit from a foam machine gun pellet at close range. There wasn’t one single flower left in our garden and I was picking crisped rice out of our carpet for months afterwards. There’s still a large pinkish stain on the rug where one girl threw her Red Alien Milkshake at another girl for ‘dissing’ her hair clips and one child was still with us at 10pm that night after his parents ‘forgot’ him.
I bought 35 white t-shirts for all my little party-goers to decorate with markers and paint. They did the t-shirts then moved to their faces, their legs, the walls, our car, the bouncy castle, the neighbour’s fence/dog. By the time they went home – what with the black eyes and the bandages and the red paint – many of them looked like survivors of some manner of major disaster. There were precisely four odd shoes left behind and never claimed. There was talk of limbs being lost, and therefore no need for the shoes, but this rumour has never been confirmed.
So we’re thinking of going for something slightly little less stressful this year – maybe climbing Mount Everest or jumping from a plane without a parachute.
Regardless of what we do we’ll celebrate the joyous occasion that made me a mother, my husband a father and our son the centre of our universe.
Happy birthday my sunshine.