How to Have a Really Very Trying Birthday

Let me give you some advice on how to have a trying birthday. I'm not the type who doesn't like my birthday, feels sad about growing older, etc. etc., so it takes a lot of effort to have a distressing birthday. Hence, I am the best one to give advice on how to make it a day to put wrinkles in the corners of your eyes.

First, and this is important, you must, absolutely must, have four children in rapid succession. This takes quite a bit of advance planning, so don't even think of having a stressful birthday if, say, you only have two children, or if you have the four already but they are at least two years apart each. If you have more than four, and if they are the requisite less-than-two-years-apart, you might as well just stay in bed on your birthday, and most other days as well.

Next, you have to promise all of those children that they may help you make your birthday cake. Absolutely promise the eldest that you will not even unwrap the butter before she gets home from school around 3:30 or 4:00.

So, it's 4:00. Washing the dishes is optional. It will clear out the sink, making cake clean-up easier after you cook, making your birthday less stressful, but it will also increase the whininess of the children who want to help cook your cake NOW, so it's up to you.

Now, get out your ingredients and make sure that you position the two-year-old near everything sticky and/or floury so he can put his grubby hands in it and  get it on the floor. Make sure you leave the sugar out so your older children can not-so-surreptitiously sneak bites of it right out of the canister giving you little brain seizures every time they do. Brain seizures keep the stress levels up, ladies! Keep up the good work!

Make the frosting and run whatever interference you need to about who gets to lick the bowl/beater/spatula.

When you take those puppies out of the oven, make sure you leave them where a two-year-old can drag over a stool and pat and press them with his grubby hands. See if he won't lick one or two.

Around 5:45 after you clean up the cake mess, start to think about dinner. Do not, I repeat, do not look at your recipe for tasty pad thai ahead of time, because if you do, you will know that your noodles need to soak in cold water for at least an hour. An hour. At 5:45. Also you will remember that you needed tofu for this recipe. So do the best you can with a quick soak in boiling water and add some extra egg instead of tofu. Hope for the best.

Make sure you promise the kids they can help frost the cupcakes, because that always makes for good fighting amongst the siblings, and, if you're lucky, a cupcake dropped upside down. Try for the carpet, but if you can't make that, the kitchen floor will do. Make sure you put coconut on every cupcake so you'll be sure that someone will cry because he or she does not care for coconut. Remind them that this is your special day, and expect more tears.

Open presents with whining all around and, if possible, get someone to smash your giant-size bag of shrimp crackers (thanks Marmot Dad!) onto the concrete, turning it all into shrimp dust.

Go to bed confident in the knowledge that you have done all you can to make your birthday Very Trying Indeed.

Then give Marmot Dad the leftover coconut cupcakes for his birthday, because you are too worn out to make another cake, ever, until your children are all in college.

At least no one vomited on me this year.

Here's a link to the coconut cupcake recipe. They were very tasty. I've never used so much butter for one recipe before in my life. But I have to admit, I chickened out at the frosting step. I just couldn't add that third stick of butter to the pound of cream cheese. They were very very tasty cupcakes, nevertheless, and I want about 85 more.

**Happy Birthday also to Marmot Dad. Tooie spilled the beans on his birthday presents (a bike helmet and bike seat) so he had to get them many days before his birthday and, with the leftover cupcakes and all, had somewhat of a subdued birthday this year**

**Many thanks also to my long-suffering sister who chopped cilantro and shredded carrots and beat back some of the marmots so that my head didn't actually explode. She also walked off with two cupcakes.**