Happy.....Birth...day...?

One always has high hopes for birthday weekends, especially when it's your child's birthday. To say that Michael's birthday weekend was an unmitigated disaster would be kind.

We started out on Friday, Michael's actual birthday, with the traditional pizza and ice cream dinner. Since our local place was closed for renovations we headed over to Rockland, to another favorite stop. The pizza was 'too crunchy' for the kids, and whenever they know ice cream is coming anyway, they're less apt to eat dinner in the first place. It turns out that THIS eatery was on the verge of shutting down for a few weeks as well, so they had about three ice cream flavors left, as they were trying to get rid of their supplies before closing. To top it all off, Enzo had an 'accident' in his underwear, for which we had no wipes or diaper. Sal ran back to the car in the freezing rain to change him, only to discover that she had left the keys on the table. We ended up grabbing some ice cream on the way home and calling it a night.

Saturday was the day of the big party. We had reserved the tubing hill at the Snow Bowl, as we have done in years past. It ended up being about 50-degrees, and the Snow Bowl cancelled. Everyone still had fun, but the tubing would have more funner.

At 5:30 on Sunday morning I was wakened by Michael moaning that his stomach hurt. Figuring that it was too much cake, too much ice cream or too muhc beer, I comforted him, but sent him back to bed. A few hours and many trips to the bathroom later, I knew exactly what regurgitated Spiderman cake looks like. He ended up getting over whatever it was that he had, and was well enough to go to a SuperBowl party, but it just capped the weekend nicely.

One might take the weekend's events as an omen of Michael's 8th year. Me, being an eternal optimist (or at least too stubborn to be a pessimist), figure that it can't get any worse, and things can only get better from here.