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My daughter’s birthday is Friday and so tomorrow, we’re going to party like it’s . . . well, 2005. She’ll be three.

She was born on Labor Day, which pleased me no end. How appropriate to labor on Labor Day! Plus, I thought, we can always celebrate her birthday on Labor Day weekend.

Except I forgot that people sometimes leave town for Labor Day weekend. To get around that fact, I decided to have the party tomorrow, a day early, at the pool. Because I have daycare kids, the party will start at 6:00 p.m. and end by 8:00 p.m., at which point all the children will have bluish lips and goosebumps and chattering teeth.

The high is supposed to be a balmy 75 degrees tomorrow.

Tomorrow I need to bake a cake (from scratch, of course) which will be half a sphere, decorated like a beach ball. I’d originally thought I’d bake cupcakes, too, but it occurred to me that I can make cupcakes on her actual birthday. I have a sudden obsession with cupcakes. But I know my limitations.

I’m serving make-your-own sub sandwiches, grapes and canteloupe chunks on skewers, mini-bags of chips, blue Jello with a bear cookie floating in a gummy lifesaver and juice. I don’t usually make Jello, nor do my kids eat it, but the little clear cups of pool-blue Jello look so cute! So, they are a decoration more than a food, I suppose. I bought ten beach balls at the dollar store and I’ll float those in the pool and pick up ten mylar balloons from the dollar store on the way to the party. Voila! Decorations!

My sunburn has gone from ouch-don’t-touch-me to I-can’t-stop-scratching-and-my-nose-is-peeling. Fun times.

So, if you don’t hear from me tomorrow, you can safely assume I’m eating frosting by the spoonful frosting a cake with homemade buttercream frosting and scratching my shoulders with with my chin and juggling the wants needs of seven children while worrying about my impending party.

When people are camping out on overpasses because their homes are flooded, it seems silly to be talking about my own internal mini-angst. In a way, Hurricane Katrina has peeled back the layers of those cities and towns and now we can see the poor and destitute, the ones we ignore under normal circumstances. Today, the television brings the faces of those desperate people into my family room with its second-hand furniture and I feel guilty for the luxury of my life.

We have so much.

That’s why I’m sending a donation to The Salvation Army. I once had a friend who lost everything in a house fire. She went to run errands and came home to a sooty shell of her home. People gave her family stuff, trying to help. At one point, they had seven couches in the garage, but no cookie sheets and no silverware. So, even though people are having their children go through their toys and are loading up clothes to send, that’s not really the most helpful idea.

Send some cash. (We donated to the Salavation Army online, but you can also go to the Red Cross website.) A hundred bucks will pay for dinner, a babysitter and a movie. Or it can buy meals for a family of four for two days, a case of water and cleaning supplies (mop, buckets, etc.)

This afternoon, I sat feeding a baby, watching the news, crying while I watched television coverage of the disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi. A CNN reporter wiped away tears as she interviewed Harvey Jackson, and I wept, too.

I simply cannot believe the devastation from Hurricane Katrina. I have a friend who lives in New Orleans with his family and I can only hope they are all safe and sound.

A few days ago, this thought barged into my head: Is this enough? What if I never write a book? What if I never figure out what I want to do? What if this is the last house I live in? What if I never do fill the flowerbed in the backyard with top soil and plant five hundred daffodils? Is this enough?

Early in my marriage and in the midst of our infertile days, I thought, well, fine! I’ll just go to school (more) and become a nurse. And even though I didn’t have children then, I had a full-time job and my husband was starting a church. I was the song-leader, the pianist, the youth pastor and the children’s church leader. I enrolled in a biology course at the local community college, the first step to nursing school. My life was full to the brim and I was exhausted and miserable.

Then one day, in class, I doodled a list of my goals. My first goal was to be a mother. Nothing else mattered to me. I finished the class and put aside the goal of becoming a nurse. Now I wonder if that was the right decision. The clock is tick-tocking and although I know I could dust off that old dream, that doesn’t change the fact that if I went to school when my daughter does in three years, I would be be 45 when I finished. Too old? No, you’ll all say. That’s not too old! My dad at 47-years old had just enrolled in the University of Washington. He would have started in September 1989, but he died instead. He didn’t think it was too old.

I can’t think of anything else I really want to do. I am an efficient and organized office-worker, but, alas, a clock-watcher. I can’t stand the feeling of being chained to a desk in a cubicle somewhere. I loved working retail–I worked in an office supply store one holiday season–but the pay is dismal and the hours unreliable.

And I don’t want to work just to earn a paycheck. If I have to devote my time to a job, I want it to be a job that matters. Which, of course, takes me back to nursing.

But in the meantime, is this is enough? What if nothing ever changes?

And I realized, this is enough. Today I count my blessings instead of the number of milk encusted glasses in the sink. I kick shoes out of my path and scoop poop from the litterbox and carry baskets of clothes upstairs and think this is enough. If my picture appeared on the obituary page, I’d be okay. Well, I’d be dead, but I’d be satisfied with my life.

Tomorrow will come and the tomorrow after that, and then the seasons will change and before I know it, the path will split into two and I’ll have decisions to make. But for now, this is enough.

(Although, maybe this is just a way to excuse my lack of career ambition.)

Now I remember why I stopped allowing anonymous comments. I wake up to things like this in my email box, which frustrates me. Who is this? Why doesn’t she leave her address so I can respond to her lengthy comments? Does it feel good to some people to vent on other people’s blogs? Am I expected to answer or just feel scolded? I don’t feel penitent when I receive criticism like this. I just feel annoyed by people’s assumptions and self-righteousness.

Anybody want to comment about this? (Scroll down to the last anonymous comment.)

Please, people! If you want to have a dialogue, you have to leave a name, an email address, and the link to your own blog. Otherwise, I truly will think you are just a troublemaker without a sense of humor. Lighten up!

Speaking of stupid, let me give you another example.

Me.

Today, I took my boys to Wild Waves. The weather forecast promised cloudy weather, sixty-nine degrees at best. Only a few miles from home, sprinkles of rain dotted my windshield. A perfect Pacific Northwest summer day!

All of this was fine with me. After all, the worse the weather, the fewer the crowds. The fewer the crowds, the less standing in line. The less standing in line, the happier I am.

Only, the clouds parted and the sun shone.

And now I–the daughter of a man who died from skin cancer–I have my first sunburn of the summer. And my kids are kind of pink, too.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I know better. I even heard that little voice in my head say, “Stick that bottle of sunscreen in the bag, just in case,” but that voice was drowned out by my actual voice shouting, “FIND HIS SANDALS! WE NEED TO LEAVE! I AM BEGGING YOU! FIND THE SANDALS!”

We did have a fine time, though, despite having to pay $35.00 for lunch at Subway inside the park grounds. A small soft drink was $2.99 and a 6-inch sub sandwich was $5.49! Since Six Flags took over the park, everything costs a whole lot more. We rode a couple of roller coasters as soon as we arrived and didn’t have to wait in line at all. The twins refuse to ride roller coasters now, perhaps because of my coercion this summer at Disney MGM, so they waited while my youngest son and I rode each one twice because he loves coasters as much as I do.

I had a moment, a flash of panic, really, when I thought, I am not going to wear a swimsuit in public! And then I did anyway. If you spend your whole life waiting for the day you are fit and cute enough to play at a waterpark, you might never do it. Meanwhile, your kids grow up! And plus, have you ever looked at people at a waterpark? Occasionally, you see a “perfect” body, but mostly you just see all sizes and shapes and degrees of flabbiness. And a lot of belly-button-rings and permanent ink designs on backs and arms and questionable unsupportive swimsuits in dire need of “What Not to Wear” help.

So, we rode tube slides and water slides and floated in the wave pool and meandered around the river rafting pool on innertubes. My youngest son, aka The Reason We Went to the Waterpark, became more and more listless, less and less joyful and finally, when I asked what was wrong, he admitted his head hurt.

He has the virus my twin boys had a week or two ago. Starts with headache, ends with coughing. At least we had some fun before his head exploded and our skin broiled right off our bones.

Here is stupidity: The parents who took their three year old boy to the movie,“Red Eye,” a thriller in which a woman is terrorized by her seatmate, who happens to be a really bad guy. These people were walking ahead of me when the movie ended and I heard the man say to the little boy, “Did you like that?” Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself, “You have GOT to be kidding me!”

Stupid people. Don’t take preschoolers to movies that are meant for adults! Hire a babysitter or take the kid to a movie meant for him. What is wrong with people?

After the last baby’s mother took her baby home tonight, I took my kids to the beach to meet some friends for a picnic dinner. My friend brought the picnic and six of her seven children. Our children ran and climbed and threw rocks into the water and talked Nintendo and took turns on the slide.

And then we watched the sun set.

The sky was stretched out without a wrinkle or a cloud. When the sun slipped behind the islands, the sky blushed and gold rippled on the periwinkle waves.

The light is so perfect at that moment, just after the sun has gone. But, alas, I had no more film. I’d taken the last picture on my roll earlier when the children all clambered onto a tree, christened “The Bird Tree,” by my 3-year old. So I gazed fully at my daughter’s face as she stood with her toes in the sand.

And then darkness fell.

My dad married his second wife in September of 1976. I wore a polyester dress with large peach colored polka-dots and looked as ugly as a twelve-year old girl can look.

My father wore a plaid jacket of some sort and my stepmother-to-be wore a cotton wedding dress she sewed herself. It had a collar and buttoned up the front and looked exactly like a suit shirt, except it had a voluminous skirt, billows and bilows of white cotton fabric.

Someone drove us to the wedding, which took place at a private residence overlooking the Puget Sound in Anacortes, I think. I’m sure my mother didn’t have the task of chauffering us, but I can’t remember who did.

The wedding itself was odd and took place on a patio which sat on a bluff. I remember my father declaring in his wedding vows that his children would come first. I really had no idea he felt that strongly about us or even that he felt any particular way about us at all. In fact, I kind of wondered why we were even going through this ceremony because if we were truly first, why did he leave our family?

I think now that it was a bad idea to tell his new bride that she had to stand in line behind us. But that is not the point of my story. Neither is the fact that they had cheesecake instead of wedding cake nor the fact that I didn’t know any of the other wedding guests.

About six months after my dad’s wedding, my mother married her second husband. He drove a yellow van and had blond hair and he made me a little queasy. But no matter. The second she married him, my dad took custody of us and just like that, my mother was free of the burden of having four children. I never lived with her again until she moved in with us in 2002. (She stayed for almost two years–I think the noise got to her.)

That Christmas–1978–I was thirteen. My dad and stepmom thought it would be easier on us, the children, to spend Christmas away from home. Our previous Christmas had been a surreal experience–my dad brought his new wife to his old home and my mom invited her new boyfriend and they all acted like it was fine and dandy. All the photographs show children slouching with dead expressions on their faces–except for my baby sister, who was only 5. To her, more people meant more presents and more attention.

So, Christmas of 1978 found us driving across the country in our little blue hatchback, a Renault, I think it was. (My dad drove a series of little hatchbacks in his lifetime, due to the superior gas mileage. He’d keep track of the odometer reading every time he filled up his car with gas and write it in a little book in pencil.) As soon as we crossed the Cascade Mountains, we realized the heater didn’t really work in the car. We’d sit on each other’s feet in the backseat to keep them warm. We rode bundled in our jackets all the way to Ohio.
And once there, we spent a dismal Christmas in my paternal grandparents’ home that smelled of moth balls and canned tuna in oil. I can’t recall any presents, nor a tree, nor a church service or Christmas music. In short, it was a truly horrible Christmas.

But my dad and stepmother were right. That Christmas trip did distract me from the shambles of my broken family, which was their hope.

At least when I try to distract my children, I use chocolate.

I said awhile back that I hadn’t been bored since 1983, which was when I graduated from high school. I loathed high school. I thought it was a giant waste of time because I could get straight A’s, even though I never took books home. (I did my assignments sometimes while the teacher took attendance or during my lunch hour in the library.) I had more Important Things To Do, though I hadn’t figured out exactly what those things were.

As it turns out, I understated how boring my days actually are. Repeating the same mundane tasks over and over bores me silly, as do the games and shrieks of toddlers. Washing twenty-seven glasses a day and folding clothes and stepping on Cheerios in the kitchen is dull.

Great stretches of my days are boring, leaving me with nothing to write about beyond, “I woke up at 7:43 a.m.,” and “the three-month old spit up in four places on my blue shirt and I’m still wearing it now.”

But, the boredom is peppered with funny little moments, like yesterday when my husband took our 7-year old son with him to the marsh to release the three captive frogs. My blond son gently freed the frogs and said wistfully, “I’m going to miss those frogs.” Pause. “They grow up so fast.”

My husband reported to me that he couldn’t tell if our son was joking. That boy can keep a straight face and sometimes you just can’t tell.

My daughter sings all the time. The tunes are familiar, but the words are often nonsensical. She belts out these words (to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”):

Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky;
Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky . . .

And so on. It’s the song that never ends. My favorite part is the “ukka, bukka.”

She ambles around the house, making up words to songs, cradling her babydolls. And every morning, she greets DaycareKid’s mom or dad with the cheerful promise, “Today, I will not hit [DaycareKid].”

On the way to the store tonight, she yawned and then piped up from the back seat: “I am not tired. I did not yawn.”

And before I put her to bed she says earnestly, “Tonight I will not cry.”

Really, it’s the little things I hope I remember, the sporadic dots of vibrant color in the gray monotony of my day-to-day routine. Because soon, she’ll realize that little stars twinkle up above the world so high and the ukka-bukka will be forgotten like so much dust under the bed.