This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Who knew so much anxiety could precede a birthday party? And I wasn't even hosting!

Star Wars cake

Not too much technical detail, but fun to do. Plus, as Owen pointed out, the clone guys on top were like extra presents.

...And you smell like one too!

So it's FINALLY not Owen's birthday anymore. Next year, I must remember to plan his party as close to his actual birthday as possible.
This year Owen's birthday fell on a Wednesday. I scheduled his party for Sunday afternoon. Somehow Owen surmised that all the days between his actual birth date and his party counted as his birthday. All I know is that by Sunday, I was officially over this whole birthday thing.
I know, I know. I do this to myself. Birthdays are only as big a pain as I make them. But I wanted to make this birthday special for Owen because he has always been our "understanding" child. That really means we end up taking advantage of the fact that he is the third child, both agreeable and eager to please. The last two years we've had a family party for him. "It's just as fun as bouncing in some inflatable castle with your friends! Grandparents! And cousins! Cake! You'll love it!" We told him his present would be a family camping trip.
Somehow, between sports schedules, work demands and parental exhaustion, we did not make good on his birthday camping trip until this past July. Ten months later!
So I wanted this birthday to be like a "real" kid birthday. I let him pick the venue. He chose Glow Galaxy, mainly because he wanted to sit in the big throne in the party room and wear a crown. But the party wasn't until Sunday. To make up for his having to attend kindergarten all day on his birth date, I planned through the cafeteria manager to spring for ice cream for everyone in his class at lunchtime. They actually suggest this now as an alternative to sending in homemade treats, and I was glad to do it.
I prepaid for the ice cream and showed up to the cafeteria at lunchtime. I told everyone we ran into that day that it was Owen's birthday. He got to go to a middle school cross country meet to cheer on his big bro, and all the big kids told him happy birthday. So by Wednesday night, as my mom used to say, I had had too much birthday.
Then he woke up on Thursday with that famous quote, and I knew I was in for it.
He talked about the party all day, every day. It really did seem like it was his birthday 24/7. The mailbox seemed to overflow with cards containing cash. Neighbors bearing gift cards stopped by. I spent Saturday making a Star Wars-themed cake, which was for the better because it distracted me during the Tennessee football game.
Then Sunday finally showed up.
Glow Galaxy wasn't my first choice, but it also wasn't my birthday. His friends came, he got to wear a crown, and he sat on a throne. He also woke up the next morning with some random 102-degree fever and has missed the past two days of kindergarten.
Like my mom used to say, I guess he had too much birthday.

Age is only a number, right?

When you’re planning to have a baby, you can't understand how important the baby’s birthdate will be.
For example, I learned the hard way that football season is not an ideal time to have a kid, as I had to plan my last C-section around that year’s SEC and Titans home schedules.
We have Big Orange friends whose second child was due in September a few years ago. The dad went to the UT game at Florida anyway, then high-tailed it back in time to see the baby’s head crowning.
Another factor to consider in family planning is youth league sports. Start researching before you get pregnant if you think you might encourage your baby to be an athlete. Find out the age cut-offs for each sport so you can avoid having your child “play up” a year.
“Play up” is a euphemism that means your boy who just turned 12 a month ago will have to step up to bat against a 14-year-old pitcher who sounds like James Earl Jones and is covered with hair. This happened to my next-door neighbor, who said her kid looked like an embryo next to that manchild.
In our baseball league, the birthday cut-off for different age divisions is Aug. 1. My twins were born July 1. So just when they were becoming mediocre in the 7-year-old division, they turned 8 and moved up from machine-pitch to kid-pitch with boys who are almost 10.
I suspect that kid-pitch is the best way dads could stretch an hour-long baseball game to two hours. At this level, coaches are less likely to switch kids around to different positions on the field so “everybody gets a chance.” Usually the boy who is the best athlete on the team, meaning the boy who can get the ball to the person he’s aiming for, is named the pitcher.
This child throws 45 to 55 pitches per inning because the rest of the team is made of boys like mine whose parents have told them they’re playing “for fun,” meaning three out of four will walk, strike out or foul off.
Fouling off is what dad-coaches do when my precious baby finally hits the ball and I start screaming because it looks like it’s going really, really far and, oh my gosh, he’s just getting to first base when some mean dad yells, “Foul ball!”
The hardest thing for me to stomach is the push for kids to be better athletes at a younger age. I almost had a stroke in 1995 when the NBA drafted Kevin Garnett straight out of high school. Now fifth-graders can have pitching coaches, eighth-graders are scouted and high-school phenoms regularly dominate the local sports page.
At this rate, birth announcements will include height, weight and batting average.

One to grow on

“Oh, you poor thing,” the Dillards clerk exclaimed as she copied numbers from my driver's license onto the check I’d just written. “Born on Christmas Day! You really got ripped off, huh?”
I glanced up from my checkbook, where I’d been trying to remember what I did with check #2642. Already that morning I had battled my way through Stein Mart’s customer service line to exchange a sweater, and I still had Toys R Us looming before me. For expediency’s sake, I stood ready to agree with her.
I couldn’t do it, though. Whenever anyone finds out I was born on Dec. 25, they always react with sympathy and attempt to comfort me about my bad luck. It makes as much sense as when grandmotherly strangers try to console me for having three boys and no girls, as if I could have -- or would have -- done anything about it.
The truth is, though, that I hadn’t thought much about my birthday falling on the biggest holiday of the year. Maybe it bothered me a bit when I was a kid. We were never in school on my birthday, so I didn’t get to see Mrs. Turner draw a birthday cake with my name on it in colored chalk on the blackboard. Since second grade, however, I’ve gotten over it.
A Christmas birthday does lend itself to interesting variations of the usual holiday practices. As a child, I left Santa a piece of my birthday cake instead of milk and cookies. And contrary to the apparent consensus of many Cool Springs store clerks, no one close to me has ever forgotten my birthday or tried to pass off one gift to cover both celebrations.
Of course, I do have to wait all year if there’s a gift I really would like to ask for, but that’s gotten easier to overcome with each birthday.
In fact, my family members have always gone out of their way to make the day special for me, from their cheery “Happy Birthday!” in response to my “Merry Christmas!” greeting to the specially designated birthday presents wrapped in paper that is any color but red or green.
Remembering those times, I realized right there at the cash register that being born on Christmas Day is anything but a rip-off. I know of no better day to come into the world than when peace and joy reign, when a child’s anticipation is almost unbearable, when people in every nation rejoice to commemorate a birth that changed history.
Sharing a birthday with Jesus Christ is a great blessing to me, and that store clerk inadvertently reminded me why. Christmastime can be hectic and stressful. But it’s also when most of us are intently focused on someone other than ourselves.
Every day, but especially on my birthday, I have the chance to thank God for gifts I’d never want to exchange.