My birthday

I woke up at 2 a.m. to K crying. He was crying because his cup of water was on the table next to his bed, while he was in his bed. I handed him the water and didn't get back to sleep for the rest of the night. It was like studying for the bar exam all over again: as soon as I got in bed, the twenty things I hadn't made time to do rushed into my head and wouldn't leave until I got up to do them.

So I did. Between 2:30 and 5 a.m., I emailed about thirty people, wrote a press release, got through my entire to-do list for a town commitment, and amended our tax return. (Why am I most productive in the middle of the night?) Then I went back to bed, but gave up on that again after another half hour or so.

K toddled out of his room at 5:56 a.m., close enough to the 6 a.m. wakeup time that we try to enforce that I didn't send him back to bed. "Is it the weekend?" he asked sleepily. "Yes, and you know what else? It's my birthday!" He gave me a hug. "Happy birthday, Mommy! Can I have some candy?" "Uh, no. Why are you asking for candy first thing in the morning?" "Because it's your birthday." K returned to this motif throughout the day. (The next morning, he asked "Whose birthday is it today?" and when I said "Nobody in this house," he looked disappointed and then asked "Can I have some candy anyway?")

JW woke up around 7 and gave me my presents: a framed picture of the three of us from K, and Elvis Costello tickets from him. Then we all went out for breakfast. K loves going to restaurants lately and we no longer dread going with him. We had a lovely breakfast together and he didn't try to jump out of his seat or bang on the table once.

I spent the rest of the morning baking my birthday cake: this hazelnut brown butter cake with chocolate ganache, plus a batch of lemon curd to use up the leftover egg yolks. While I was making a mess in the kitchen, JW had to clean up K's mess in the living room. (K had decided to wear underpants for the first time.)

My cake was a little homely -- I had to use a pie pan because I didn't have a cake pan big enough, and I smeared on the ganache while the cake was still warm because we had to head out to a relative's house for lunch. These relatives kept inviting us and we kept not being able to go, so this time I felt like we had to say yes. They didn't know it was my birthday and I didn't want them to make a big deal out of it, so my plan was just to show up and say, "By the way, it's my birthday, and here's my cake."

A little while after we got there, my cousin's husband disappeared and took JW with him on a mysterious errand. Finally I got my cousin to tell me where they went -- to get me a birthday cake. "But I brought a birthday cake," I protested. "We want to get you something special!" she replied. "But... this is my birthday cake. I planned it, and I spent all morning making it," I said. "We don't need another cake. There will be enough for everybody. Isn't my cake good enough?" "We just want to get you a nice cake for your birthday!" she repeated. I was upset. But I am 32 now and I have to be gracious, so when they finally returned with a stupid cake from Whole Foods, I smiled and said thank you. It turned out that everybody swooned over my cake and nobody touched the other cake, so there. But then they made us bring it home (and there was only one tiny slice of my awesome cake left, and they kept it!). JW brought the intact "special" cake to work with him.

Anyway, I got to eat home cooked Bengali food on my birthday, and my two little cousins were there and JW and I went out for a walk by the river with all the kids. So that part was fun, even though we ended up hanging around there for most of the day.

By the time we got home, I was exhausted from being up since 2 a.m., so I just cooked up some pasta for a quick dinner, gave K a bath, answered a birthday phone call or two, and went to bed.

Not the birthday plans I would have chosen, but it was nice to be with family. And it was especially nice having JW take care of all the baby-wrangling -- I didn't lift a finger all day.