The Triple Birthday Party Strikes Back

Newsletter 2021-05-16

Exhausted.

That's the only word that can describe what my wife Lola and I are feeling right now. The week leading up to the annual triple birthday party is the most mentally, emotionally, and physically taxing time of our lives, and this year, we experienced it in overdrive. Picture hell week from the Navy SEALs, but with fewer pushups and more cleaning. And, this time, more mulch. In a marvel of precision family planning, our oldest two daughters, Betsy and Mae, have birthdays exactly two years and one day apart, and our third daughter, Lucy, has a birthday two days and two weeks after that. (Our youngest, Waffle, on the other hand, was born seventeen months after Lucy because, right from the start, she’s always done whatever she wants.) Every year, we throw a big, joint birthday party for the first three girls and invite everyone on both sides of the family. Partially, it’s to celebrate that our kids survived another year, despite their unstoppable drive for self-destruction. Serious…