Multiple parties can leave you birthday bashed

Laura Ingalls Wilder and her ilk didn’t know how good they had it.

In one particular week recently, I was in and out of stores 75 times — no, make that 85.

It was my daughter’s birthday. It was my husband’s birthday. And it was Father’s Day.

All in the same week.

To boot, the local discount store was having a tablecloth sale, so that in between shopping for balloons, streamers and just the right assortment of presents for a 12-year-old girl who doesn’t want to grow up, I spent half an hour finding four tablecloths, only to realize after I got home they were the wrong size, at which point I went back to the store where they were now also having a sale on glassware.

In Ms. Wilder’s day, as lore would have it, the frontier mother went to town once or twice a year to buy everything.

And “everything” wasn’t so much.

There was no standing in the aisle trying to decide between Ruffles with Sour Cream and Onion or Ruffles with Mesquite Barbecue for the pre-party icebreaker — just bins of flour and sugar and barrels of pickles and the occasional bolt of calico that came in special from Kansas City.

Give me clothes to wash by the river any day, last week I had to decide on streamers for four different parties — four being the operative number, despite there only being three life events to celebrate, because of a relatively new phenomenon of which Ms. Wilder probably knew nothing either: In 2004, parents throw their kids not one, but two parties, one for family and another for friends.

Never mind wagon trains, I lived in the mini-van that week with my bottle of Tylenol, motoring back to the store three times to get watermelon since I kept forgetting that was my daughter’s favorite food. I bought regular balloons at one store, water balloons at another, and at a third, a birthday balloon that is the size of our dining room table and is still, several weeks later, floating on our ceiling as I don’t know what else to do with it.

There were trips for an ice cream cake from the ice cream store for the kid party, a Sara Lee cheesecake from the grocery store for the family party, one 11-piece box of chicken from the deli for the family birthday dinner and ingredients for six homemade pizzas from the discount grocery store for the kid party.

This does not even begin to address my husband, whose birthday will not be forgotten, even that one year when I was three days postpartum with the aforementioned daughter. Nor does this shopping summary include presents, about 22 in total, if you count barrettes, gel pens and a specially ordered Jeep hat for my husband.

People talk about how hard frontier life was for the frontier mother, what with there being homemade candles instead of electricity, whalebone corsets instead of Cross Your Heart bras and no epidurals.

They didn’t know a thing about the stresses of consumerism, and choice.

All that driving, parking, shopping, deciding, checking out, putting bags in the car, taking bags out, putting things away only to realize they are the wrong size or color or shape or that you forgot to buy wrapping paper is enough to make you want to stay home and bake bread from scratch. Or, at least, park your car and buy everything off E-bay.

Me and Laura. We would have been peas in a pod.