A Difficult Six

We celebrated M's birthday the weekend before she actually turned six. Her birthday was on a Wednesday, and Papa and I are both gone all day on Wednesdays. We both leave the house at 7am. I drive to school and he goes to work. Then, we don't get home until after 5pm. Normally, birthdays that fall on weekdays get moved to the weekend after, that way we don't miss any cards or gifts that our far away relatives might have mailed. This year, though we had plans for the weekend after M's birthday: zombie crawl. Besides, we were having family visit for the weekend before her birthday. We like to share birthdays with family.

We don't make a big social event out of birthday parties. We don't send out invites or plan to have tons of guests. We have four kids - three birthdays - all in the fall/winter. We don't have that kind of budget. On a couple of occasions, though, birthdays have fallen near times when people were planning to visit for other reasons. So, we throw the party in while our guests are here.

Sometimes I ask what theme they want for the party. For M, I already knew. She checked out a book about sharks from the library and renewed it the maximum number of times, keeping it for 9 weeks. We read it multiple times. She learned (and actually retained) a lot of weird facts about sharks. Did you know that the outer layer of shark skin is made of tiny, tooth-like things called dermal denticles? Skin teeth. Seems like sharks are basically made of teeth. She was sad to see the book go.

So, M had a shark party.

I spend days making cakes and other baked goods for birthdays. I think I'm hoping that my kids will remember that when they're older. My mom says they'll remember that and think, "no way. I'm not baking cakes." That's okay. I just want them to remember how much I cared about their birthdays. Plus, I love baking.

Decorating is rewarding but stressful. Fondant is... torture that sometimes produces desirable results. But baking is relaxing. With three birthdays every year for the last 8.5 years, I've found some great cake and frosting recipes. I get better at decorating every time I try it, but... it's a slow process.

This year, I made cookies with royal icing t
o go with M's cake. I had never made or used royal icing before. The recipe I used didn't turn out quite as smooth as I would have liked. The cookies took an entire day to make and decorate from start to finish. They tasted okay. They were honestly kind of unremarkable, but they were worth making because now I can try again and do things a little differently until I get it right. You have to start somewhere.

We went to the fall festival before coming home for cake and cookies. She played in a giant hamster ball and a bounce house and ate festival food. I didn't take a lot of pictures of that. She had a great time and everyone was a bit sad when we had to go home. There were so many other things they wanted to do at the festival, but we didn't have time.

This year, Daddy got to be at her party. For a few years, he lived more than a thousand miles away, in Florida. Now, he lives five minutes away, in an apartment complex with a pool. They see him several times a week, now. They get to have dinner with him twice every week. He gets to be at their birthday parties.

M's six years old, now. She's really into sounding out new words and slowly adding new sight words to her vocabulary. She loves library books. She loves sharks and wants to learn to rock climb and go indoor skydiving. She likes to sit on the roof of the playhouse and talk to the kid on the other side of the back fence.

She's going through a bit of a regressive phase recently. Daddy has told me that "regressive phase" is a nice way of saying it. For the last couple of months, she refuses to do what we ask her to do. She pouts, whines and throws fits in "baby talk". She briefly decided that if we asked her to go somewhere, she would, instead, grab on to the nearest large object and refuse to move. She looks frustratingly pleased with herself (or maybe with our reactions) as she does these things.

So, predictably, she gets timeouts. We have always had timeouts for fit-throwing and disobeying. We make an effort to distinguish between requests and commands, and commands are mandatory. If she refuses to respond to a command, we warn her of the possibility of a timeout. If she continues to refuse, she gets a timeout. Her timeouts are now 6 minutes long.

Consistency seems to be helping. It sure helps me retain my sanity, just knowing what comes next. I'm sure she just wants more attention. There's a lot going on around here. She has the twins as older sisters, and they have each other. She has the Cub as a baby brother, and he gets a lot of adult attention because he's potty training and always in things he shouldn't be. I'm at school twice a week, Papa is at work five days a week, Daddy is at school and busy most of the time. I imagine she feels pretty alone.

I'm going to try to work on that.