Puddi's Budday Party

Puddi had the suckiest birthday ever this year - when she grows older, she's gonna give me the evil eye for this! I had been travelling all week on work and got back Thursday evening, pooped and ankles swollen to the size of footballs from all the air travel. Friday, Puddi's birthday, I had to go in to work to check on the piles of emails and other pressing issues that had been building up for the last two weeks. A had his CEO coming in from Mumbai so he had to rush out to work at 8:30.

So after a quick bath to the two kids in the morning, A and I were out the door and gone all day. As luck would have it, my mom's knee had seized up and she was unable to walk when she woke up so dad rushed her to the doctor for a check and physiotherapy and so on, and they were gone all day. So Puddi didn't even get her usual share of cuddles and fun at their place. In the evening, A and I had to go for the ultrasound check-up which was our second Downs' screening, since we had to meet the OB-Gynthe coming saturday and would have no time during the week. So by the time we got home, Puddi was fast asleep, her birthday slipping past as if it had been just any other day, and in fact, worse than an ordinary day, with her grandparents being gone and her parents coming home late.

Last year, her birthday party was on the hottest day of the year - it was 48 degrees C! We had organised the party at a venue outside because we'd just returned from a holiday and the house was still getting put back together. And thanks to the weather, a lot of our guests who had kids of their own didn't dare venture out so the party was a bust, the only good thing being Chubbocks' delight at Mickey Mouse attending the party. Chubbocks was very into Mickey Mouse last year and kept wanting to have him over to play (!) So once A and I had to make a phone call to Chubbocks, with A speaking squeakily, to tell Chubbocks that Mickey was on his way to Disneyland, but not before Chubbocks extracted a promise that Mickey would visit on Puddi's birthday. We hired this guy from a party place whose job was to walk around in the Mickey costume, and the air or whatever his costume was inflated with kept running out so every few minutes a somewhat flatter Mickey would walk out the door and come back looking a few pounds heavier...quite ludicrous but Chubbocks was on fire from the sheer joy of it!

This year, we planned for a small party on Saturday, the day after her birthday. As we had done with Chubbocks, so with Puddi, we decided to keep it family only until she turns four and has friends of her own. So my in-laws came down from Aligarh, and A's aunt and uncle, his cousin and wife and their daughter, and my parents. And of course, our downstairs neighbour who's seen both of our kids since the day they were born and is been super-fond of them. My folks had organised a Puja at Malai Mandir so the kids were fed, bathed and packed off early in the morning, while I got busy cooking a traditional festive meal for lunch with Puddi's favourite saaru-anna and cucumber kosambri, shaavige payasa and fresh homemade ghee. After I was almost through with the cooking, I too rushed to the temple to catch part of the puja and then came home with the two kids.

A and I wanted to take Puddi with us to buy her present and went off to the neighbourhood Landmark store. I was clear I didn't want any Barbie/ Disney Princess stuff so after a lot of lookign around, we picked out a DoodlePro with colour pens which were also eraseable. I didn't think of it at the time but I should have been wary because the last time Puddi got her hands on sketch pens, she created weird indelible patterns over all the cushions and drapes in the playroom, but mommy guilt and love was not making me think clearly at the time. Back home for a quick but enjoyable meal (and how much I relished the taste of good old saaru after two weeks away from home!), and we lay down for a brief nap.

The good thing about calling family over is that one is less stressed out about organising. We had decided to keep the high tea simple, with dhoklas ordered from our favourite sweet shop, as well as small kachoris. The cake was a giraffe ( that's a whole other issue. I wanted a simple square cake with pictures of many animals on top. The cake shop said they couldn't do it so A asked for a dinosaur and finally settled on a giraffe. Then the cake shop said they could only do it for a minimum order of 2 kilos(!!!) which is overkill for 10 people. But finally we just gave up and said ok. Of course, it was disappointing when it came, because the giraffe was brown with dark brown splodges, and they had only made the giraffe's head, not the whole animal...).

Mom had made walnut-almond burfees. And I made Khara Bhaath with vegetables, hot and fresh off the stove.

Puddi has been excited about the Happy Birthday song since Chubbocks' birthday so she was thrilled when we all sang it to her. And she looked like a little princess in the Rajasthani lehnga-blouse my parents had got for her birthday.
She thoroughly enjoyed her share of cake and then fell in love with the Doodlepro and spent the rest of the evening scribbling away, with me wearing out my biceps trying to erase the colour markers ( they are not!!! easy to erase). Puddi and Chubbocks insisted on putting the Pink Panther CD on for the amusement of their cousin and the neighbour's son, and it was a real pleasure to hear the two of them giggling and laughing out loud with each antic of the panther.

Though the day of her birth turned out to be so bland, I think she had a great time the next day to make up for it, and loved all her gifts which included a wooden shape-sorter. And the best part was that the party was small enough to neither overwhelm us nor her and she got to be in the spotlight, which is the main point of a birthday party.

Privileged Kids

Remember how simple and how fun birthday parties used to be back in our growing up years? You'd go around and invite all the neighbourhood kids - no fancy schmancy invitation cards. I can't remember ever inviting a school pal who wasn't also a neighbourhood pal, because people came to school from all over Delhi, and it just wasn't practical or even the done thing to ask your parents to ferry you across the city for a birthday party. At school, you handed out one or two Ravalgaon or Parry's toffees - those hard ones that you sucked and sucked until they became brittle, sharp little things that you could crunch up in a jiffy - to everyone and that was that. Or, when you grew older and had a 'set' of friends, you would treat 5 or 6 of them to the stale samosa/ bread pakora that the school canteen offered.

My parents didn't believe in decking up the house with all manner of balloons or crepe paper - If I wanted crepe paper put up I had to do it, and I had better things to do with my time. The neighbourhood kids would troop in one by one, clutching a gift sometimes - I had a huge grouse against my dad because he had this thing against announcing that we were having a birthday party - he'd insist that I say it was just a general kids' party, so if I didn't dare to hint at least to some of my close pals that it was for my birthday, no one would come clutching gifts - and that's kind of the whole point of birthday parties, right? All the kids would be dressed neatly and tidily, the boys with hair well-oiled and sharply parted, looking like geeks, and the girls, as always for 'occasions' in frilly and hideous frocks, with socks and Mary Jane shoes. We would play games like passing the parcel or, as one grew older, Treasure hunt. I still remember making up the parcel that was passed around, carefully writing out the instructions for each layer. The return gifts for kids would be toffees and sometimes, those Flora pencils with the pink flowers on them which were always cherished, and erasers. Sometimes one would get 'scented rubbers' and all the kids would keep sniffing at the scent as if it were 'all the perfumes of Araby'. All the food would be cooked by hardworking mums who'd have worked through the day. One never had a store-bought cake, at best a home made one if at all. Biscuits, glasses of Rasna or Squash, homemade namkeens and some sweets. And one went home conscious of having had a riotously good time.

Today things are mighty different. My son has a birthday party every day this week, since his entire class at school has kids who have mid Feb - March birthdays. Today's party is at a farmhouse. All the party invites have come as formal cards, and some of the parties have had themes - Ben 10, Power Ranger, Superman and so on. They have been at exclusive clubs with puppet shows, toy train rides(!), magicians and so on. Mothers have swished up to the venue in their gleaming mercs, dropping Chanel bags and diamonds. One such invitation that we declined on the grounds of not being fancy enough ( us not them) was way back in playschool for a kid who was turning 3. His parents had organised his birthday party at a 5 star hotel in town, complete with a cocktail party on the side for the adults. Even the presents and return gifts are so elaborate - one of the presents he got last year was a toy robot, and return gifts include all kinds of merchandise from the latest cartoon craze to strike the kids, mugs painted with their photographs, fancy photoframes, clocks and the like.

Honestly, the level of action at these birthday parties makes me feel a little ill. I'm just not equipped in attitudinal terms to go with these flows. For Chubbocks' 1st birthday party, my folks hosted a party where they invited all their friends and ours. It was held at a club but pretty simple despite all that - just good food and a few balloons. Since then, until last year when he turned 4 and started to have friends of his own, I had simple family and close friends parties at home - up on our roof garden since his birthday conveniently comes just when all the spring flowers are in bloom. All the food was home made, there were no balloons and no hoopla, just a bunch of people who loved him and us and got together to celebrate his arrival. And we're pretty clear in our policy for birthday gifts - we always give books - either the classics, e.g. fairy tales type, or educational ones, and those too within a certain price range.

Last year we hosted in a Pizza Hut because I had my hands full with a fulltime job and a nursing baby, and while they did an ok job, I found the party lacking soul. This year, we're back to hosting it in a park within our colony. The only catch is that A has decided, in a fit of extravagance, to hire a Columbus ( the swing ride). Honestly, it's costing quite a bit and while we can afford it, I'd rather the money was put to better use. But I am making all the food, except the cake, at home. This year's party has gotten a little out of hand, to tell the truth, and I'm struggling to make my peace with it. For many reasons, including the wasteful expenditure, but most of all because I can't bring myself to imagine that kids would have that much more fun surrounded by all these organised amusements and doodads than simple games that involve running around mindlessly and tiring themselves out. And because I don't want my kids growing up with anything but middle class values like hard work, simplicity, perseverance and a healthy value for money even if our incomes have lifted us out of the middle class category.

I've already decided that next year for his birthday, I'm going to go right back to my roots and host a simple party at home, with home made food ( well, ok, we'll order the cake) and party games for indoors and outdoors which involve playing and not 'being amused' like so many little Lords and Ladies. And if his friends don't appreciate it tough luck - I'm pretty sure my kids will. And even if they don't and feel a little deprived, well, all it means is that I need to work harder at inculcating a sense of values into them.