The Exhausted Dad: The birthday one-up game

Kids make birthdays more fun for everyone, as youth can be a distraction from the faint-but-ever-growing knocking at the door of our certain, future demise.

Surely my request for ice cream, pie, donuts, fancy coffee drinks and candy on my birthday won’t help these old bones navigate through middle age.

But kids love all those things too because birthdays mean treats! Also presents! Off-key singing! No reason to be so glum if you approach birthday festivities with the spirit of a kindergartner.

Plus I’m a guy who loves presents. Any presents… handmade or store bought. Preferably both.

I genuinely love the gifts my kids make for me, because, for the most part, I admire how much effort they put into them. My 5-year-old won’t be an artistic prodigy with his stick figure drawings and jagged little handwriting, but he shows intention with every stroke of the crayon.

This is how he explained his admittedly convoluted-but-colorful birthday card for me: “This is a picture of a car with LOTS of features on it. These are the rocket boosters, and here is the blaster, and this is where you sit, and this is where it shoots out ice cream and…”

My oldest son, 9, takes great pride in his drawings and art, to the point where he’s probably 1-2 percent personally responsible for the world’s deforestation. He’s the type who, if he doesn’t like a certain line or shape in his drawing, will toss the sheet of paper aside and begin again with a minty new one, no matter how little he used it. What about an eraser, you ask? Please. The lad won’t tolerate even a hint of a faded, unwanted pencil mark or eraser bits tarnishing his masterworks.

Anyway, his birthday card was stellar… gorgeous even. I’d describe it more, but I may have misplaced it.

My oldest daughter loves various crafts, but her go-to gifts are colorful rubber band bracelets with fun, weaving patterns. The bracelets are also very easy to lose if you take them off, creating the constant need for a new one at gift-giving time. This year she made an extra wide rubber band bracelet (what are you trying to say, kid?) where her weaving pattern spelled the word “DAD.” Very impressive.

Then there’s my youngest daughter, a middle child, now 8 years old, who will not miss an opportunity to argue that she’s the MOST generous kid in the bunch with the MOST love for her dad. She will not be upstaged by the likes of her foolish, amateur-gift-giving siblings.

First, she made several drawings. Well…. She made one drawing for my birthday, then saw that two other siblings made me drawings. So her gift had to include MORE drawings. So she gathered drawings she already made weeks earlier. One “gift” for me was a picture of a groundhog looking for his shadow. Because, according to my daughter, “Dad likes groundhogs.”

She also noticed that her younger brother had “wrapped” his picture by rolling it up like a diploma and sealing it with tape. Not to be upstaged, my daughter found the case for her Minnie Mouse watch so she could have a fancy box to stuff with at least seven tightly folded pictures, including the groundhog. It took a good 20 minutes to unfold and marvel at every picture she included, which was obviously the point. She got more attention for her pictures than all the kids combined. Take that!

My daughter also recently learned how to make those fun rubber band bracelets, and, once she realized her older sister made one for me, she confiscated my new “Dad” bracelet and went to work on her own bracelet to give me, using her sister’s measurement of my fat wrist to guide her work. I half expected for her to return with my “Dad” bracelet “accidentally” sliced into a million pieces.

If that wasn’t enough, my daughter made sure to say “Happy Birthday” at a 5-to-1 rate of her other siblings, and, by the end of my birthday, her “Super Duper I Love Yous” contained at least 36 supers and 54 dupers.

Nobody shall upstage her Birthday Game. Maybe we should brainstorm some healthier ideas to boost her self-esteem. But not on my birthday. She can one-up her siblings all she wants so long as it’s to my benefit.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.