Improvised Birthday

<p>My baby turned four yesterday, which means he isn’t so much baby anymore. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of time for planning a huge birthday celebration. A week ago we returned from a nice vacation visiting my parents in New Mexico, and this last week has been a busy one with Raven doing OSCON, leaving the house before the kids were up most days and returning after they were in bed. The older boys did the first week of drama camp (Harry Potter!) and loved it, and I spent more time driving than I would choose to.

With little time for shopping or planning, and as I think I’ve mentioned, not being a big fan of elaborate children’s birthday parties, or more, not believing I quite possess the skills required to make it a happy event for birthday child, guests, and parents, even though other people seem to pull it off, I had to find other ways to make the day special for Rainer. We’ve evolved our own tradition of the birthday treasure hunt, and I was inspired watching Rainer and Søren announce themselves future paleontologists after visiting OMSI’s dinosaur exhibit (and also, the previous week the New Mexico Museum of Natural History) so I decided that Rainer’s pre-reading scavenger hunt would be something completely new for us: a dinosaur dig! It took a lot of patience with searching because there are dinosaur pages out there with all sorts of interesting homeschooling-for-religious-reason slants, but I found the cool “dig up dinosaurs” PDF on this page and after the boys went to bed Friday night stayed up until 2 a.m. cutting out cardboard dinosaur bones.

So when he woke up yesterday morning he was handed a bowl of sand and sent outside with it:

In this bowl he carefully searched for “bones”

which were laid out carefully

and he, of course had lots of loving assistance,

but watching I was proud of how his brothers were excited for him and involved but willing to sit back and let him do it himself. I loved how the final assembled dinosaur looked.

And written on its bones were directions for where to look for his gift, a BBC video DVD set entitled “The Ultimate Dinosaur Collection.”

To utterly flog a theme, we then planned on then taking all the boys to the Oregon zoo where they have a dinosaur exhibit. But on arrival at the zoo all of the parking lots were full. The hardest part of zoos for me is people at the zoo, and more of them seemed too much, so we decided to try something else and drove across town to the small Oaks Amusement Park on the banks of the Willamette where, not only was parking impossible, but we could see really long lines waiting for each and every ride. Less fun. And this is where Raven’s genius pokes through — he came up with indoor miniature golf which we had completely to ourselves until the last five minutes or so, because on a beautiful day in Portland there is an unofficial law that people be outside enjoying themselves. And thus no one minded when it took me 11 or 12 strokes to get the ridiculous little ball into the hole. And being downtown, we then walked five blocks to Portland’s best toystore – Finnegan’s, and let Rainer pick out a Playmobil dinosaur set (also: found the very cool Schylling metal potholder weaving loom

that my father had been nostalgically recalling last week!) Then, since Rainer had requested “mango lassi” for his birthday dinner we went to an Indian restuarant for an early dinner so we could race home to set up for the monthly family-friendly werewolf game that we have committed to doing for Aodán and Xander since they love the game so and cannot come to the one held in a bar. And even though I didn’t feel stressed about hosting a “birthday party” it was wonderful to be able to sing “Happy Birthday” to Rainer with some of my favorite people in Portland and have them cheering him on as he blew out the candles

And best of all, our family friends the Burchams stuck around afterwards, and we got to watch the kids play Rock Band.

So by the time Rainer fell asleep hours after any orthodox bedtime, he was a pretty happy child, and we were a happy family.