The twins' third birthday is almost upon us and while whenever I ask them what they want they firmly declare that: "Santa is going to bring us lemon cake on our birthday", their older brothers are not so easily fobbed off.
This is the problem when birthdays and Christmas are all bunched up in a clump, as the bigger boys get lots of treats and presents between October and December, but then it is a LONG wait till their next special day. Since the twins were born their birthday in February falls during this lean period and my older sons don't like this at all.
When I asked my eldest what I should get the twins he grumpily declared: "Nothing", before launching into an impassioned plea that I should buy him the Harry Potter Years 5-7 Wii game. I don't think that he has really got the hang of this other people's birthdays lark.
I do feel sorry for him as our family was very poorly planned on the birthday front. The celebrations kick off with Mr FDMTG's birthday on September 11th, followed swiftly by my birthday on 26th, then my middle boy on 14 October and my oldest pumpkin on 31 October. Add to this that their paternal grandpa, aunt, uncle and one cousin also have birthdays in September, October and November and this end of the year is seriously overloaded with big days.
When I was idly thinking about having a third child I imagined it would be nice for him (or her) to be born in the summer time so I could host those lovely relaxed parties in the park, where all the entertainment I needed to provide would be free access to the monkey bars and all the cake crumbs and spilt squash would melt away into the grass.
As with all the best laid plans this went to pot and my twins were born on a freezing cold February day. Snow was still dusting the ground and it was a bleak grey sky that filled the window of my hospital room. February is not the ideal month for a birthday. Most of us are still broke and bloated after Christmas, the weather is invariably awful and it is at least a bleak six weeks till Spring begins to brighten things up a bit.
I had hoped that having a birthday in this month might serve to brighten it up a bit, but it just seems to rub my poor older boys' noses in the fact that it is absolutely ages till their own birthdays. When they were tiny the grandparents would always buy them a little gift to take the sting out of their siblings' birthday. But now that there are four of them this could prove costly and and I also think that by the ages of eight and six they need to begin to understand the concept of things not being all about them.
My attempts to bring them up into civilised human beings is not going well as both are stubbornly failing to enter into the spirit of the twins' birthday and greet all conversation about it with a sulky silence or demands for presents of their own. I am hoping that a party on the day with plenty of cake and sausage rolls will at least go some way to putting their noses back into joint. If not it's only another seven months till they can hog the celebrations all to themselves again.
Tell me about it....my daughter is 27th December and I still feel bad about it! My third child is October and I actually count that as a good month, certainly compared to December, and my husband in January!
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