T-man’s birthday is at the end  of July.  Having a January birthday myself, I’ve always been a little jealous of kids with summer birthdays.  They get the warm weather, the chance to be outside, the option of pool parties and picnics.  January weather left me with pretty limited choices when it came to my birthday parties.

Summer birthdays seemed like a glass half full to my glass half empty.  But that was before I had a kid whose birthday fell smack dab in the middle of summer.  In North Carolina.

The extraordinary heat.  The dice you roll when you plan an outdoor party. The difficulty reaching school friends once they’ve scattered to the summer winds along with the frustration of finding a date when people are actually in town.  These last two obstacles are why we finally convinced our son to take a different approach to his birthday this year.

T-man may have turned eleven in July, but we figure if they can celebrate Washington’s birthday on a Monday falling up to a week before the his actual date of birth then we can exercise a bit of, well, flexibility when it comes to a tween’s party.  Thus T-man’s “birthday observed” fell in September this year, a plan that worked out pretty well overall.

He wanted to have a sleepover at the lake.  September isn’t ideal weather for swimming, but those youngsters are made of sturdy stuff so we figured they’d probably survive it.  And most likely enjoy it, since kids are odd like that.

It’s not exactly a party concept that’s easy to pull off…a sleepover at the lake means coordinating the drop off of four to six kids at our house, loading everyone and their stuff into both cars (along with what seems like three weeks worth of food), and driving an hour to the lake.  Once there we have to unload the whole kit and kaboodle into the house, unpack the groceries while riding herd over Kids Gone Wild, then attempt to corral them long enough to feed them dinner and cake.

These parties at the lake are like sleepovers on steroids.  It’s taking possession of other people’s kids for 24 hours, but I start to wear thin somewhere around hour 15.  Because after dinner and cake (which they never, ever really eat) they’re whirling dervishes until we shepherd them into rooms, conceptually to go to bed. Not like that actually happens, but we give it the good old college try.  Then no matter how late they stayed up they’re still awake at the crack of dawn, raring to go.

Thus starts day two – a power breakfast (which one kid always passes on in favor of cereal) to get them ready for their morning of fishing, swimming, and boating.  Eventually we round them up for lunch (which one kid always refuses in favor of leftovers that he wouldn’t eat the night before) and we go through what I’m now convinced is a futile attempt at making sure every kid packs every belonging to take home.  We then throw the whole thing in reverse, pack up the troops, and cart them all back home.

It’s seriously hard work.  It’s draining.  It’s ridiculously exhausting.

But it makes the kid happy.

So T-man had an “observed birthday” sleepover in September, and even though it ended up being kind of rainy he still had a fantastic time because his friends were there.

It takes me about three days to recover, but so be it.  That which does not kill us, right…?