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It was my daughter’s first birthday party and it was a day of utter chaos. I have had some parties in this house in the past, but none as loud and raucous and unpredictable as this one. Not for the last time, I suspect, my daughter ended the day being sick all over her bedroom floor, though I think on this occasion it was just the excitement in conjunction with a little bit of a bug. She’d hardly had any beer at all.
It’s not quite a year since her birth - the actual birthday is on Wednesday - but this 12 months has passed in a blur and it’s very hard to believe that we’ve got this far. And by all accounts it’s going to speed up ever quicker and Phoebe will be 18 next time I look at her. The accounts are wrong. I just looked at her just now and she’s only…. shit, since I turned back to type this she has aged 40 years and I am dead. People were right. I should have listened.
It was just our families in the house for the first couple of hours, which was lovely. We pushed back all the chairs and Phoebe walked round the room in her little baby stroller car, like she was royalty, waving, shaking hands with her grandma and great-granny, before rushing towards the door trying to run over her screaming cousin Sarah (which admittedly is less like something royalty would do - in public at least). When my folks had first arrived Phoebe had been a bit overwhelmed by the sudden influx of people and wanted me to pick her up and protect her from her own weird relations. She held on to me really tight, which was rather a nice feeling. Like I could something to protect her. But it’s flattering that she thinks her daddy can protect her. I will do all I can, of course.
But soon she relaxed and was happily playing and being passed around this ragbag of idiots.
It was quite a boozy affair given the birthday girl was only going to be one and I drank more beer than I had intended. And then friends, many with children arrived and the house was bursting at the seams with babies crawling around and little kids running up and down. One of Phoebe’s birthday presents was a little table with troughs for sand and water and the babies all loved this and soon there were mud pies on the floor and wet sand splashed on the windows. But it didn’t matter. The adults were trashing the place in their own way too.
As the party wound down I ended up taking the very unusual step of playing snooker against another person. The whole world goes upside down on a birthday, I guess. But as my opponent was eight years old, it was sort of equivalent to playing against myself. I was quite drunk so I guess that made me Me2 and he was like the original Me1, young, polite and not very good at snooker. I took him to the cleaners. Except we agreed that whoever got the final black would win the frame, so somehow he won 2-1. But otherwise I took that 8 year old to snooker school.
I crashed out at 8pm, finally all the waking up at 6am for a fortnight (plus booze) did me in. But luckily for me my daughter was sick at about 8.30 so I had to get up to try and mop up the huge amount of puke. I can’t necessarily protect her against everything, but I am always on call and was less grudging than I could have been.
My life has certainly changed in the last twelve months. I think it’s probably a good thing.
