Thursday, September 30, 2010

Have Yourself a Sex-Free Solstice

I’ve just spent far too many hours planning my son’s birthday party. I know. You think that’s because I’m having 50 people and a petting zoo. No. It’s because his birthday is in September.

In fact, my son’s birthday party will (with any luck at all) consist of six 10-year-old boys, including my son, who will all watch a movie and then make heinous concoctions out of ice-cream and then eat those heinous concoctions and then act like aborigines until the sugar rush subsides or their parents come to get them, whichever comes first. What I can't pin down is when such a gathering will occur.

September is an impossible month to plan a birthday party. Practically everyone who has feet plays soccer and soccer season begins in September. Throw in the Jewish holidays, the fact that a certain amount of time must be given for new alliances to form with the new school year, and my own misfortune of having a son who fancies only a small group of boys at any given time and at this time those boys all seem to have their own autumn birthdays, and you have a situation where there’s only one single date over the span of a month and a half that can accommodate most of the kids. And your job is to spend countless hours figuring out which date that is.

Email seems like it would expedite the task, but today it just seemed to make it worse. Each email I received felt like it brought more bad news. “Sorry, soccer tournament.” “Sorry, that’s my other child’s bar mitzvah.” “Sorry, that day is my son’s birthday.”

“Is it possible to change his birthday?” I wrote back. “Just for this one year?”

Here’s my solution: Everyone…stop having sex in December. If you’re trying to have a baby, there are just some months that should be completely off limits for conception. I’d imagine you could throw March in there as well, because I’m sure the moms of December birthday kids have a similarly hellish time with this whole birthday planning thing.

I’m going to go so far as to say that someone should sit down and plot out which months are good to conceive and which months are going to be a nightmare. We then need to review those dates and JUST SAY NO.

As I write this it’s less than four hours until October. I’m no closer to a party date than I was early this morning, and there seems to be no resolution in sight. It’s too late for me, but some of y’all can still save yourselves. Practice abstinence in December. You’ll thank me for it come party time.

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