party

19th Party

Monday 22 December 2025

The evolution of the Girl’s birthday parties over the years has completed a full arc of planning and responsibility. Her first party doesn’t even hold a place in her own memory: we picked a theme, made the guest list, decided on the menu, chose the cake, determined the games and activities. It was less a party for her than a party around her.

As the years progressed, we brought her more and more into the planning aspect of her parties. Where do you want to have it? Who do you want to invite? What sort of cake do you want to have?

Then, as she edged toward adolescence, she began taking a more active part. She prepared snacks, festooned the living room with balloons and ribbons, and took an overall more active part in the whole process.

Her last couple of parties were almost all her doing. She made all the plans, prepared all the decorations, went shopping for this or that element. We helped here and there, but it was mostly her party and her work.

Tonight was her nineteenth birthday party, and the only thing K and I did to help her was clean the basement den that served as the venue and help keep the kitchen clean as she baked the cupcakes she wanted and her birthday cake, prepared the charcuterie board, set the drink table, and the million and one little things she did to get everything just as she wanted it for her party.

There remains only one more step: the transformation from co-host to invited guest. That’s still a few years off, but it will be here sooner than we expect.

Birthday parties, then, serve as a sort of indicator of independence in one’s child’s life.

Unexpected Party

Saturday 18 January 2025

Tenth Party

Friday 20 May 2022

Christmas 2019

Wednesday 25 December 2019

A few shots from our Christmas walk with friends.

Few pictures from the party with the same friends because we were to busy having a Christmas party: eating, drinking, singing, talking, laughing, repeating.

Pre-Christmas Family Reunion

Sunday 22 December 2019

Christmas 2018

Tuesday 25 December 2018

During a proper party, a proper family gathering, time seems to disappear into an eternally present "now" that blends effortlessly out of the last moment, imperceptibly into the next, a continuum of laughter. A proper Christmas day, then, should be like a proper party. And what better way to start the smiles than a pile of hot waffles.

And what better activity after breakfast than to help with the Lego set the Boy got yesterday? Truth be told, it was a challenge for me to understand those instructions at times, so it's no surprise that high on his priority list was getting some help.

We build this knowing that as soon as the snow plow is completed, it will be a focus of attention for a few days and then disappear into its constituent parts into the growing box of Legos that now must contain well over a thousand blocks, what with all the sets he's gotten and the Lego windfall he got from his sister a year or so ago when she decided she was too old for Legos. Of course, you're never too old for Legos, but there is a period called adolescence when you might think you are.

In the early afternoon, we all went to spend Christmas lunch with Nana. We ate some split pea soup and chatted while the children took turns rolling about in the wheelchair in Nana's room.

Back home for the afternoon, we passed the afternoon at the table with talking with Papa while the kids played in the backyard, E still in his nice Christmas clothes that required some work when he returned because there was no way he was going out to play and not wind up at the creek that forms our rear property line. If you're a six-year-old who has a creek in your yard, you use it.

Finally, around four-thirty, we headed to our closest friends' house, the godfather of E (and he's proud to remind us of that regularly) taking with us E's godmother -- K's sister in everything but name and DNA and so for many reasons, the closest thing we have to Polish family here.

And so the evening just began slipping away, punctuated by grand food, silly kids, discussions of camping and finding cheap flights to the Old Country, hot toddies and black coffee, jokes, singing, and just enjoying the fact that we have such good friends.

But the Boy didn't make it. He put up a fight, tried to stay awake the entire party, but there was just no way.

Saturday 02 June 2018

Christmas 2017

Monday 25 December 2017

So often in life, things come to an end and we don't even realize that we're living through last moments of this or that. Someone might lose a job and the whole family leaves, and you never see them again. More tragically, someone might pass away unexpectedly, and we regret deeply that we didn't know that the last time we were with that person.

When an end comes and we know it's the end, then we tend to savor it all the more.

Friends are moving to Connecticut. Good friends, for the last several years. Christmas, Easter, and Halloween we have always been together for the last several years. And tonight was the last time we'll all be together for Christmas, perhaps for good. Sure, we talked about going up to Connecticut for a visit, but the chances of that happening, of us all being together like that, are quite honestly very slim.

It added a gray lining to the rest of the evening.

Christmas 2016: Nostalgia

Sunday 25 December 2016

I'm not quite sure where they got it -- maybe we gave it to them, or perhaps they just bought it themselves. In a way it doesn't matter. What matters is that when E found the little Leap Frog play house that was just like the one he played with as a little toddler ("Daddy, I'm not a toddler any more. I'm a little boy."), he was utterly enchanted. He took the little house over to the small couch in the sitting area just off of the dining room in our friends' house (they do Christmas; we do Easter; another family has taken Halloween, even though it's not a traditional Polish holiday) and just played with it as if it were the greatest thing. I wondered for a moment if perhaps he was experiencing his first little bout of nostalgia.

I always wonder about that: what will set my kids off when they're adults, what will send them back into the past with a certainty that times were somehow better then and a strange emptiness with the realization that those times will never return. Or maybe that's just the stuff of romantics, and perhaps my kids won't grow up to be nostalgic romantics.

But there are worse things than being nostalgic romantics. Nostalgic romantics get to sing Christmas carols with an abandon that others lack. The act is a time machine.