Last week, my son turned five. Instead of having just one party, my wife and I decided to turn the entire week into one continuous event; sort of like a sugar fuelled Mardi gras style celebration. There were three separate bashes, each one filled with satanically delicious frosting. Here is a run-down:

Kids Party with Friends-Richardson Nature Center:

Murphy was so amped for his party that he got up at 6:15 am. He tried to leave the house straight away, but he wasn’t fully dressed. I tried to dress him and it was like trying to put pants on a cat. We got to the nature center and set up in the party room. It was a drop-off party.   Ten kids showed up. We went on a nature hike with a Park Naturalist. Inside the nature center, we looked at live turkeys, owls, and raptors. Then she brought a snake into the party room. For desert, my wife brought Clone Wars cupcakes, which had a massive dollop of electric blue frosting smothering each one. The kids’ chowed down and within five minutes the room resembled one of those bench clearing brawls in baseball. The neon colored sugar was basically raspberry flavored cocaine for kids and soon they were bouncing off the walls.   I needed a taser. The park Naturalist came by and shut the doors to the party room. “You’re disturbing the animals,” she said kindly. 

School Celebration:

Murphy brought two buckets of donut holes to his class to celebrate his birthday. The kid’s pounded down fist fulls of fried dough and sugar. Then they proceeded to pound the living day lights out of each other on the playground as they played smash-up derby on their tricycles. He was given a commemorative crown to wear. He tried to wear it to bed.

Family Party-Smith house:

The extended members of the Smith family invaded my small house in south Minneapolis. Murphy answered the door in a Star Wars Storm trooper helmet, signaling the onslaught of mayhem. A Darth Vader piñata was inadvertently filled with hard plastic toys. It exploded in the living room, raining trinkets down on the kids below like shrapnel from a nail bomb. Then we played a game of pin-the-light saber-on Darth Vader. My sister in-law Lesley remarked that all the handmade light sabers that were to be blindly and playfully stuck on to a Vader helmet resembled giant red penises. Grandpa Smith pulled a head band over his eyes, spun around, and looked demanted as he tried to pin the red-saber-penis on to Darth Vader. The kids laughed. The adults were frightened. An ice cream cake was brought out and promptly destroyed. Not eaten. Destroyed. The cake from the Cold Stone Creamery was so good in fact, my in-laws showed up at my house two days later like twitchy junkies looking for more.  They asked if we had any left in the freezer. We did, indeed, and another round of ice cream cake was annulated.