Flexibility is NICE

I don’t mean the bendy kinds. I wouldn’t know what those were if they walked up and punched me in the face.

No, I mean the sort which allow you to do what you need to when you need to do it.

You see, my kid, Mal, was the first kid born in AZ in 2013. I would say that is some sort of PII (personally identifiable information) which should never be shared, but there were news articles written about it. He’s never going to be able to use his birthday as a secure method of password retrieval, that’s for sure! But the other down side is that he’s never going to get very good birthday parties. He’s always going to be out of school and the like. And as a guy with a late December birthday, I feel his pain.

And so it was strange when, a few weeks ago he started announcing to us and his summer daycare provider that his birthday party “with his friends” was “next week” (everything that isn’t tomorrow is next week for him). He kept insisting over time that this was a thing that was happening. The lady that watches him is off next week and he starts school the week after, so yesterday she kind of shrugged and along with my wife said “Hey, let’s throw him that party.”

They got him some decorations and some cupcakes. The babysitter even went and bought him a present (and she had another girl having a birthday next week, so made it a group affair).

But the point to all of this is that even though I had a TON of stuff, including a meeting with my lead today, I was able to re-arrange things fairly last-minute and was able to attend (I think it helps that my lead’s birthday is January 2nd and so he KNOWS the pain)! I was there — along with my mom, his grams — to celebrate.

He’s old enough now that he’s going to start forming permanent memories. I hope that one of them is that he got to have a birthday party with his summer friends and some day he’ll look back and realize that it was just some random day and it was for him and the little blond girl.

As usual, thanks, remote work and Automattic and Jeremey in specific for giving me the opportunity to see that!

You can see photos from the party right here, but I included my favs below.

A quiet moment before the storm.

 

Action shot of the paper hat being pulled off and discarded.

 

Tags: birthday, cupcakes, family, flexibility, kids, photography, remote working, unbirthday, work