Parenting 101: Celebrating the “Boss” Birthday

Belated happy birthday…

With fuel price high in our mind, we decided to go ahead with the birthday celebration of our son but perhaps on a smaller scale. My wife had worked out a “plan” to do the cooking at home but without tiring herself up and blowing the tiny budget (we already cancelled the catering option and reduce the number of people to be called on the guest list).

Somehow, knowing that prices have gone up forces us to “strategize” on what and how we are going to buy things for the birthday celebration. As requested, we wanted to get an “Ultraman” cake for the big guy but when we looked at the image on the sample book, it looked so “cartoonish”. We settled for the next best thing – a Spiderman “crawling” on the cake.

We wanted to start early and end early but time after time again, we are proven wrong. The Malaysian or Indian time as many of us called it worked against us as usual. The function supposes to start at 7 pm but only 8.30 pm, we had enough “crowd” to start the cake cutting.

The bulk of the guest came in after 9 pm – a good 2 hours after the official start time. We did not complaint though – smaller crowd was easier to manage and cared for during the dinner.

Wow, see how my son was so excited with the singing of birthday song and being the focus of attention (not that he was not earlier on but with a knife in front of a creamy cake, things get more exciting). When we sang the birthday son, my son started to dance and display many interesting pose – ultra man cross hand pose, 2 arms on the air pose, etc.

His excitement was simply infectious. We almost started to do funny poses ourselves.

Many relatives came for the celebration – the food that was prepared for the guest was just nice (my dad was worried that there would not be enough for all). My son got many toys, clothes and more importantly cash. Thankfully he was too tired to play with all the toys – we managed to hide away some for “rainy season”.

The last guest left at about 11 pm. Budget for the day was manageable but only after I opted out from buying beers for my cousins and uncles, something that was forgiven by them. Fuel hike is on everyone’s mind these days. So, not paying for hundreds of ringgit for beer is excusable at least for now.

A celebration like this reminds us as parents that we need to do everything possible to ensure a better and safer future for our kids.

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