the business of birthday parties

Alice attended her first ever non-relative friend-from-daycare birthday party today. With her parents in tow, 'cause she's only two ya know. It was at this place, and OH MY GOD was insane. Crazy. Chaotic. A place where already-hyper kids on crazy sugar highs run around with NO SHOES ONLY SOCKS and throw their bodies down a three storey-high tunneled slide. Seriously.

But we went for the child's sake and she liked it for the most part. Most of the kids were older than her (4 and up) so she was a little out of her league. But of course she put on a brave face like the girl that she is and tried to keep up the best of them. Things started to turn ugly, however, when she found herself trapped in a crazy maze-like structure. You know those slide structures at McDonald's Playland? Ok - think of those, but maybe to a power of 10. Basically, death tubes. Or SERIOUS INJURY slides. I can not stand them. Why don't they make them see-through at least, so you can actually SEE your child as she is losing her shit when three huge five year olds crawl over her to see who can spit down the slide farthest?

(as you can see, today is brought to you by CAPPED LETTERS)

So, I had to go into emergency rescue mode, crawling up an orange tube trying to coax my scared daughter to come down toward me. While other children are trying to also crawl over me and I'm yelling at them " can you please back off? This little girl needs to COME DOWN." We made it out, of course. Barely, as I described it to Matt later.

Alice got over the near-death experience, though, and was soon gulping down TWO cups of orange pop before I knew what was happening. And then she climbed into the bouncy castle and threw herself around like a chimp on speed. I watched uncomfortably from the sidelines, cringing every time some bigger kids came THISCLOSE to jumping right on her face. Alice's face was pure bliss, as she jumped and jumped with such wild abandonment. I, however, was counting the seconds until we got out of there.

When we finally escaped, loot bag in hand, we sat in the car for a few moments. Just taking in the quiet moment and attempting to get all our heart rates back to normal. I was about to wax poetic to Matt about the horrors of places like that and how they made their business out of bithdays, when Alice piped up from the back seat (chocolate cake in her hair and orange pop smeared all over her face) "Can we go to my birthday party now?

Crap. Four months and counting.