Waffle's Big Day

Newsletter 2023-11-09

My kids are getting older—again. At least this time it’s only one of them. Regardless, it’s a bad habit and it needs to stop. When my wife and I decided to start a family, we wanted children, not adults, yet our offspring keep growing up despite our specific instructions to the contrary. Waffle turned eight Thursday, kicking off the part of the year when all four children are no longer two years apart. When people ask me the ages of the girls, I’ll now stumble over Waffle every time until the triple birthday party next spring when the other girls return to their natural spacing. With aging comes panic. Lola and I must now frantically clean the house before people show up for Waffle’s solo party Saturday. As an added challenge, we have Halo Day the morning before. The clash was inevitable. My day of beer and video games is always scheduled for Veterans Day, since I usually have it off and the kids don’t. Not that I can’t have fun with them around. It’s just a lot easier if I can swear when I lose, which I’ll be doing a lot. The two combined events should make for an interesting extended weekend. If you don’t hear from me again, know that it was too much for my own aging body. Either that or I had an unexpectedly good day at Halo and decided to quit writing to go pro at playing video games. That’s about as likely as my kids voluntarily deciding to be done with this whole birthday business. I’ll let you know how things turn out.

Picking out presents for Waffle has been a challenge. Her interests cover a little bit of everything but mostly whatever her sisters have that she doesn’t with an element of randomness thrown in. For years, she was a big fan of unicorns. It had no connection to my online persona. In fact, I don’t even think she knows I call myself the exploding unicorn. She prefers her unicorns intact and sparkly. At the same time, the gift she’s tried the hardest to steal from her sisters in recent years was the box of mini chip packages that my eleven-year-old, Mae, got last Christmas. We already recommended that one set of our friends buy Waffle her own variety pack of chips for her birthday. If she gets them, I’m sure she’ll share and set a new precedent for generosity. Just kidding. She’ll crunch each and every chip loudly in her sisters’ faces.

Waffle picked out her gift from my wife and I herself. She was at the store with Lola when she found a Lego set with horses. Lola bought it on the spot. Then she got home and realized she previously bought the exact same set and stashed it away in our closet for a future birthday or Christmas. That’s the problem with planning ahead: You have to remember what you planned. Otherwise, you’re just as surprised as the kids when we see what’s in there. Fortunately, the store we bought both of them from has an unlimited return policy, so one of the sets will get exchanged. Either that or we’ll just give Waffle double the number of horses. You can never have too many ponies.