BIRTHDAY PARTY UPDATE

Lillie's 8th birthday party is over.

Things don't always turn out how you think.

The free YMCA pool party turned out to be kind of, well, weird. Fred had the nerve to compare it to "Little Miss Sunshine," although I'm not sure what he meant by that and I don't think he does either. I guess it was the element of looking around and thinking, "This isn't what I was expecting, and you know, it's also a little strange."

Lillie wanted to invite just the girls in her class, because boys "look funny in swimsuits." Okay. Whatever. We printed enough invitations for the girls, and Lillie took them to school, with instructions to pass them out tactfully so the boys wouldn't feel bad. (I would never send invitations to school for just some girls and not others, but I thought, hey, she's inviting all the girls and no boys--that's okay for a school distribution, especially on the last day when they've all got other things to think about.)

Lillie had been invited to two parties by boys, but we didn't RSVP for those, because I didn't think she should go to their parties if she wasn't inviting them to her party. She was fine with that.

That evening, I had a message on my phone: "Um, this is Travis's mom, and we're calling to RSVP for Lillie's birthday. And Travis is having his party this Saturday, and we were wondering if Lillie is coming."

Dang. Track down Lillie, confront her. "Oh," she says, "I had two extra invitations, and Travis and Brandon wanted them, so I said they could come."

This is, of course, my fault for expecting a second-grader to understand the subtleties of birthday party etiquette. Of course, sweet Lillie would announce to anyone in sight that they could come to her party if they wanted to.

I was now faced with the fun task of calling Travis's mom and saying something like, "Hi, Lillie will be at Travis's party, and by the way, she left some of her invitations at home, so she didn't have enough at school to give all the kids. So if your son has any friends in the class who didn't get invitations, please let them know that they are welcome to come."

Or the alternative: "Travis wasn't supposed to get an invitation and isn't really invited. It's just for girls."

Being chicken (and, I hope, somewhat polite), I chose the first option. Travis's mom told Tyler's mom, so Travis and Tyler were coming. No girls RSVP'd at all until the morning of the party, and then just three. One of them brought her little brother.

Tyler brought his older brother--a brother old enough to have the beginnings of a mustache. He was supposedly there to help Tyler in the pool, but he also sat at the table with the kids, participated in games, and took a goody bag. He seemed like a nice kid. But it was a little odd.

Lillie comes from a class where only strange children accept birthday party invitations, that's all there is to it. Does Maya, the school counselor's daughter and obvious future president of the student body, come to the party? No. Only odd children and their mothers come to the party. (We are not simply a weird family ostracized by the normal families at school. Although we may be a little weird, Francie, who is just one grade below Lillie, is in a class full of room-mother-type parents who bring their perfect children to everything, including Francie's parties, thank goodness.)

Okay, I admit it, not everyone at the party was odd. I invited a few kids that we knew from other sources, who are normal with normal parents (as normal as we are, anyway). And there was one little friend of Lillie's from the class who was very nice. Her grandma brought her, and I can say with some certainty that these are not people I would suspect of whipping up batches of meth in their garage, something I'm not quite sure of with the other parents.

Here's the best thing about Lillie's party. She doesn't care. She doesn't care that both moms who stayed (Travis's and Tyler's) were kind of strange. She doesn't care that most of the girls in her class couldn't come. She doesn't care that the YMCA pool wasn't all that great.

Lillie doesn't even care about Travis and the balloons. See, we decorated primarily with balloons. Then Travis' mom announced that Travis is allergic to balloons and can not touch them, so then Grandma Kay, my mother, a former teacher and therefore overly concerned with political correctness when confronted with groups of children, proceeded to swat all the balloons into the corners of the room in an effort to save Travis from them. I'm tellin' ya, it was a weird party.

But Lillie, bless her heart, thinks that she had the best birthday party in the history of the world.

Here's a story about Lillie. My grandmother is in a nursing home now. My mother visits her daily. We don't visit often, because, well, I'm lousy at nursing homes, and it's hard to corral the kids in a very non-kid-friendly environment. This is not an older adult assisted living facility, it's a nursing home, where most of the residents wear diapers and don't recognize their own children.

But sometimes, my mother takes Lillie over, because, she says, Lillie will talk to anyone there. Lillie DOESN'T SEEM TO KNOW THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THE RESIDENTS. She chats, happy as she can be.

My mother recently moved from a duplex to an apartment. Lillie suggested to her that she move into the nursing home with Grandma Mary, because they could share a room, and wouldn't that be nice? My mother says that upon hearing this, Amelia, age twelve, looked at Lillie as if she were nuts, but Lillie didn't see any reason why anyone wouldn't be happy to move right into the nursing home. Lillie would probably have been fine with us having her birthday party at the nursing home.

I am a birthday party klutz, birthday party phobic. I would rather scrub floors than throw a kid's party, mostly because I always feel, afterward, as if I didn't do a good enough job. I am so grateful to this kid for loving her strange birthday party. It makes it all worth it.