Ten Birthdays

Son Number One turned ten years old last week. Ten! Now, many of you with older or grownup kids are probably saying, “Been there,” and many of you without any kids are saying, “So what?”

I can assure you, when you have children, and the oldest one turns ten, the first thought through your head is, “Holy crap, I’m old!” Then the second thought is, “Holy crap, he can’t actually be ten. He was just five a few minutes ago, and now he’s in double digits?”

Then you do the math again, and then the thought hits you that if he has really been around the house for ten years already, then it’s only eight more years until you have to pay for college. Which, apparently, in parent years is only like six and a half minutes.

Then you faint.

Then your wife revives you by kicking you in the ribs and saying, “Get up, old man.”

You start to come to, muttering, “need… more… money.”

You wife responds, “Tell me about it!”

You get the feeling she didn’t know you were referring to your son.

She has known he was turning ten for a while. That’s because she is a woman and doesn’t forget things like the birthdays of her children. You, on the other hand, being a man, were reminded of his birthday the same way you have always been; by your dentist’s office. They send a nice Happy Birthday email every year.

I actually had quite a few clues leading up to the date, because my wife had already thrown him ten separate birthday parties. Not parties with cakes and hats and noise makers, mind you, but little events labeled as “doing this for his birthday.”

His birthday falls on the Thanksgiving break every year, so every year my wife uses his birthday as an excuse to do things.  We went to the movies “for his birthday.” Before that we had gone to pizza “for his birthday.” And mini golf. And ice cream. And dinner out.

Oh, and Monterey. That’s a whole separate town. It’s a three-hour drive from here. We were going there anyway for a family baby shower, but my wife mysteriously used his birthday as an excuse to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium the next day. I don’t know why we needed an excuse, but there we were, looking at hammerhead sharks and watching bat rays mate “for his birthday.”

And that was all before Thanksgiving. Then the family arrived for Turkey Day, and the aunts and uncles and grandparents spoiled him all over again. I’m pretty sure he thought the actual Thanksgiving dinner was “for his birthday.”

I have mentioned to my wife on a number of occasions that I think we might be spoiling him a little. She sees no issue. I have even brought up the possibility that the other two boys might eventually notice, and possibly resent, the disparity between their birthday celebration and those of Son Number One.

Yes, I said “celebration.” Singular. Son Number Two and Three are two years apart, but they were both born in April, and their birthdays are four days apart. They get a single party between the two of them, with some leftover Easter candy and maybe a cupcake if they’re lucky.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. It’s not that my wife is playing favorites; it’s just that she is sensitive to a certain specific birthday problem; namely, sharing your birthday with a major holiday. She had a rough childhood, birthday-wise. She was born on Christmas Eve.

Sharing your birthday celebration with The Big Guy can’t be easy for a kid in the first place (and I love her parents dearly, and not to throw them under the bus publicly), but one year when the family was having house guests for Christmas, they forgot her birthday completely.

I guess their dentist’s office didn’t have a reliable email service back then.

So, you can see where she could be a little worried about her son “sharing” his birthday with a big holiday. So I cut her some slack when she overcompensates a little with the whole “doing this for his birthday” thing.

I just pity his future wife. He might throw a fit if she doesn’t cook him a turkey with stuffing on his birthday and take him to the aquarium. I’ll give her my in-laws’ phone number. I blame them.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shop for a small combination birthday/Christmas gift for my wife. She loves those.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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The Bat Rays and the Bees

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium this past weekend.  We saw trained sea otters perform amazing tricks like swimming in circles and eating fish. We saw huge bluefin tuna swimming at dizzying speeds in order to eat squid. We saw swirling silver clouds of sardines and anchovies eating krill. Basically, everything was eating. Except us. We did not have a spare two hundred dollars to drop on five sandwiches and a bottled water.

I say everything was eating, but that's not entirely true. The bat rays were engaged in another kind of life-sustaining activity. We were at the petting zoo portion of the aquarium, where you can lean over the edge of the shallow pool and pet a bat ray as it swims by you. I was on one side of the exhibit with our two older boys, and my wife and Son Number Three were on the other side. Suddenly, a great commotion arose around them. Thrashing and splashing could be seen from the water in front of them, and the crowd around them erupted in a mixture of oohs and aahs and laughter. All we could see from our side was the splashing.

I half-yelled over the water to my wife, "What's going on over there?"
"Uh... They're wrestling..." (sound of adults in crowd snickering)
"Is that right?" I replied, skeptically.
"Yep. Wrestling. Silly bat rays. C'mon, son, let's go see the otters again."

Since the bat ray petting pool is geared toward kids, I would expect the aquarium to try and limit any hanky panky by the bat rays to the holding tank in the back room. In their defense, however, I would imagine it’s pretty tough to tell the males from the females, given they all look like a squashed cartoon head with wings.

Speaking of inappropriate animal behavior, do you know what else is not geared for kids? Bat orgies, that’s what. The bat ray incident reminded my wife and me of another captive animal nookie situation we encountered a few years ago. I can’t remember if we were at the zoo without our kids (which seems highly unlikely), or if we had just abandoned them to fend for themselves (which seems totally plausible), but somehow my wife and I ended up in the bat exhibit without kids. That turned out to be a good thing. A very good thing.

The crowd in the bat cave was stirred up by something. Nervous laughter, giggling, exclamations of “Oh my!” and “Honey, close your eyes!” greeted us as we made our way to the glass. Inside the bat enclosure we were treated to a sight that still haunts me to this very day. Hundreds of horny little bats were engaged in what can only be described as a Sodom and Gomorrah-type free-for-all. It didn’t seem to matter to the male bats if the freaky winged mammal they were hanging next to had compatible reproductive organs or not. Bats apparently have a “love the one you’re with” mentality.

Bats are scary enough just in general, but what we saw that day cannot be unseen. I felt like I might need therapy afterward, so I don’t even want to imagine the fallout if our kids had been with us. I can tell you that a lot of little bats babies were probably made that day, along with a lot of uncomfortable situations the next day at the bat coffee shop.

“Oh, Jim, look. It’s Dave and Marcie. Let’s go say hi.”

“No! We’re leaving, honey. Don’t make eye contact with them. I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’m just saying, zookeepers of America, a little sign or something at the door would be nice. “Warning, bat orgy season. May not be suitable for children or most adults.”

At least put a coat hanger on the bat cave doorknob to warn a guy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I realize nature is going to take its course. And, nowhere is that more evident than the sleepy little beach town of San Simeon, California. It is sleepy for most of the year, actually, except when the elephant seals are in town. For reasons known only to these ridiculously large sea mammals, they show up every year on the same beach to breed.

A few years ago, we were visiting the coast, and we were told by some locals, “You must go see the elephant seals. They’re amazing!”

So we went to see them. When we got there and witnessed the scene, my wife and I immediately wondered why the folks that told us to go there didn’t mention what the seals were doing there.

The seals go there to do other seals, if you know what I mean. Seeing two gigantic male elephant seals fight is pretty impressive. Seeing a gigantic male elephant seal “wrestle” with a female elephant seal is also impressive, but in a much different way. Boy, can those things wrestle!

Like the bats, they really aren’t too shy, either. The San Simeon Elephant Seal Voyeuristic Society has even erected, if I can be so bold as to use that term, a nice wooden boardwalk overlooking the breeding beach, with fun facts about the elephant seals.

“Never go near an elephant seal, especially during breeding season.” Yeah, based on what I’m seeing here, that one didn’t really need to get written down. It’s fairly obvious that I do not want to get in the middle of any of the activities I’m seeing here.

Luckily, the kids were all pretty young at the time, and the “wrestling” up on the beach was explained away, and we could fairly easily divert their attention back to the bloody tusk fights taking place out near the water.

“Why are they fighting, Daddy?”

“To see who gets to… uh…”

“To see who gets to do what?”

“Uh… to see who gets to eat all the food. They’re very hungry. Speaking of food, let’s go get some in another town.”

Son Number One is in the fourth grade now, and the boys are already coming home from school with all sorts of fun “facts” they learn on the playground. I know it’s getting close to the time when I’ll need to start having “the talk” with my boys, but I’d like to put it off for a while longer. And I’d like to have that talk on my own terms. I’m not interested in having any unplanned visual aides to explain. Bat, bat ray, or otherwise.

One thing is for sure. If we are going to keep taking the boys out to view the birds and the bees, I need to have the talk pretty soon, or “wrestling” is going to start taking on a really weird connotation for them.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!