The voice whispered from my son’s room, I cracked an eye open and glanced at the clock, quarter to 7. The first time in 7 years that my son was up before I was on his birthday. Usually birthdays are like Christmas and Easter, where I get up around 5:30 or 6 and tinker around the house, setting the stage for the morning to come. Brew coffee, check, pick up anything that wasn’t picked up the night before, check, get the video camera ready, check and grab the camera, check. At Christmas, I always turn on the lights so the kids can wake up to a magical sight of a shining Christmas tree filled with presents.

After my checklist is complete, I head back to bed and pretend to sleep until the kids get up. This birthday, though, he beat me to the starting gate and I decided to just stay in bed and let him come and get me.

Birthdays are a very important event in my house, or rather the kid’s birthdays are a very important event. I have special birthday traditions that I follow every year and I always recommend them to everyone.

The first tradition, like many, are the setting up. The night before the actual birthday, my husband and I sit in the living room and blow up enough balloons to fill the floor. In the center of this sea of balloons are the presents.

In the morning, the kid’s stumble out of bed and find the balloon filled living room. From there they open their birthday presents (I like to give a small one to the child who isn’t the birthday boy) and then we have a great breakfast.

As much as the kids love the balloon filled living room, I know that it will probably be a short lived tradition. I can’t see a 16 year old being overjoyed with the balloon tradition but until then, I’m happy to keep it up.

This isn’t the tradition that is important, however; the most important one is a rule that I set into place on my oldest’s first birthday; we never work on their birthday. That’s right, I close up shop and have always done so, even when I worked a regular job with a cranky employer. I would scrape up those holiday hours just to blow them on one day of fun, but it is totally worth it.

This year, yes I took the day off, was spent with a day of hiking, fishing and picnicking. We just enjoyed the outdoors as a family and although we didn’t spend much, it was an excellent day. My son was overjoyed when he found a fossil of a trilobite (much to our surprise) and even more ecstatic when he caught a crayfish.

The day ended, as it always does with a nice meal and the birthday cake. At the end of it, my son wound his arms around my neck and whispered, “Thank you for such a great birthday.”

It was a reminder that no matter how busy life gets, he knows that I will always be there when it really counts.

So I’m curious, do you have any birthday traditions?

Sirena Van Schaik

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