#HappyBirthday

While the birthday and associated celebrations happend a month ago, this post will talk about the very interesting turn of events leading up to the second birthday celebration. So, because of COVID, we weren’t able to celebrate my son’s birth or his first birthday with family and friends. It was just a small at home celebration with the three of us. However, with the second birthday, with things opening up and all of our close friends vaccinated and boosted (except for the kids under 5 – a risk we were continuously evaluating), we decided to have a get together.

My son’s birthday falls in april and its usually touch and go in terms of the weather. To minimize COVID risk, we wanted an indoor+outoor facility. We called several places and none of them were available on the dates we wanted. After a lot of search we found a perfect place but it was quite a drive (about 45 minutes to the east) out of town in a remote area. After much deliberation we decided it was too far out and reserved a picnic area in the park instead. All we could do now was hope for good weather. My brother’s family and my brother in law’s family were flying in for the birthday celebration and my folks were here already. They were all plannning to stay at our place so it was going to be a full house for a couple of days.

We started prepping for the birthday party. I reserved a tent and chairs to shade the party guests from the elements. We started ordering birthday supplies made arrangements for cake, food etc. We had positive RSVPs from most of the people we had invited. Everything was going well! Except, as the d-day drew closer, we realized the weather was going to be nasty. With rain, thunderstorms and 40 degree temperature predicted, we figured that everyone was going to be miserable. Well, we had no option but to march on and hope that people showed up.

The birthday party was on Saturday and my brothers family arrived on the thursday evening. After dinner, over drinks, we were discussing what the situation will be on Saturday given the weather. We discussed the possibility of shifting the birthday celebration to our home. With 40+ invited guests, I was strongly against it given it will be a mad house with kids runnng around and no room for people to breathe. My brother asked about trying to find a banquet hall to set it up indoors. Just 2 days before the event I thought it was impossible to get anything. However, my brother, being my brother was relentless. He started calling hotel and banquet halls in the area – at midnight! – to see if they had availability. Couple of them actually picked up and asked to call in the am.

Next morning, he continued his pursuit while we drove an hour north to pick up the tent and chairs. On the way back we got a call from one of the hotels saying they had the availability and we could go take a look at the hall – so we did! We liked it and, even though, we got the tent and chairs, we had the park reserved (after paying a fee), we decided that we should hold the party indoors. We booked the space, updated the invite and informed everyone that it was now in a indoor space owing to the weather. Luckily, all but one family decided to show up. We were worried about the party being a coivd spreader but luckily, it was not. In hind sight it was a good decision to hold the party indoors. The weather was cold and wet outside. People, especially the kids, would have been miserable if we had continued with our original plan. Overall, the event was a success. Our son had a blast and looked like every one of the guests did too. Even though we overspent a bit and double booked a few things, we were glad that we were able to celebrate and everyone had a good time. All in all, an eventful and fun birthday! Here is a snap from the event showing the hastily put up decorations 🙂

Hastily put together decoration for a transportation themed birthday

This past week was my son’s first birthday! All that means is that the planet earth made a trip around the sun and is back at more or less the same place relative to the sun. In terms of space-time, we are never back at the same place. The sun is revolving around the galactic core and the milky way itself is moving relative to the local cluster and space itself is expanding. Check this video out if you aren’t familiar with how everything in the universe moves and how the current calendar came into being:

My point is, the yearly celebration is quite arbitrary. If the earth took a couple of months longer to revolve, our birthdays would have been every 15 calendar months. I think what is important is to celebrate developmental milestones, but may be our developmental milestones also align with the revolution of the earth because of millions of years of evolution 🙂 ? Anyhow, given our lives revolve around the revolutions the earth makes 🙂 , it is important to celebrate milestones based on this construct. So we planned to do exactly that for our son’s birthday. Except, you know, COVID!

We still decided that such an important milestone be memorable. While we could not invite friends and family to a party, we neverthless did a small celebration where we decorated the house and my wife made a cake and we did a video call with out close family on his birthday. Our son seems to like the llama llama books so we made that as the theme for his birthday. Here is what the setup looked like:

The following day, my wife had planned for professional photoshoot. We were hesitant to do it because of COVID but the photographer had been quarantining between shoots and planned to wear a mask for the duration. So we thought that it was a tolerable risk. My wife was very exicted as this was the one thing she had been meaning to get for a while! We thought that we would do it at our son’s birth but, you know, COVID! We made arrangements for the photoshoot to be llama llama theme and we planned our matching outfits and got new ones for our son. My wife had also ordered a bunch of 12-18month outfits. As is customary, I put all the new clothes to wash and thought I was all set for the photoshoot day. On the day of, I was looking through the wash pile for the planned outfits and could not find them! I spent 30 minutes searching for them and have no idea were they were. Infact, 3 days on, I still don’t know where they are. In my mind a false memory of me washing the clothes was generated and I told my wife we were all set for the day. Imagine my wifes disappointment 😐 ,especially, since she had been looking forward to this for so long. Because of the snafu, we got delayed going to the photoshoot by an hour and did not have time to print our son’s milestone card on the way to the shoot as we had planned. Luckily the photographer was kind enough to accomodate our delayed start. We ended up getting some amazing pictures from the shoot that we will be printing to adorn some of the walls in our house

While the day was a chaotic one, the most important thing is, we had an unforgettable experience and a memorable day with those memories captured for us to relive over and over!