blogtober day 11 :: birthday season 2025

And…done! Birthday season is finished for another year, and each year it becomes a little simpler; I never thought I would long for the days of decorating cakes until 2am, but here we are. It is a strange sensation to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Stranger still to have two coffees down before the birthday child is even close to stirring. September doesn’t feel quite as exhausting as it used to, but on the flip side, it also doesn’t feel quite as magical.

If I were to hazard a guess, this is likely to be the last birthday season post on the blog. The cakes these days are easy to make but boring to share – Beetle requested a cheesecake, Bear a chocolate cake with no icing, Boy2 started to make it interesting with an icecream cake, but I’m pretty sure the only reason it’s a themed one is so he had an excuse to make me buy him a model motorbike. Butterfly was the only one with a fancy cake and that was less about her actually wanting a flash cake, and more about her not really having an opinion combined with mummy getting an inspiration strike.

There were mountain bike rides instead of pass the parcel. Art supplies instead of dollies. The biggest boy got some mum-made envelopes with themed cash gifts, because what else does a uni student want (no seriously, what, because he was giving me nothing in the way of ideas). Beetle was the cat’s hero of the day; his lego set came in a rather large box that Scarlett has decided is hers.

But even as I write it’s not as magical (and certainly it feels different), my favourite memory of each of the younger three’s birthday was managing to shock them; a large Lego set, a game console, a craft machine. Items they’d mentioned but hadn’t expected, or that I’d successfully been able to bluff as not an option. I think it may be even more rewarding shocking a teenager into awed silence, than it is a toddler, who gets excited by the present and then equally so the box it came in.

The hardest part was one I sort of saw coming, but didn’t expect to hit quite the way it did – it was the first year we spent apart from the birthday boy. Bear spent three weeks at home, and then we put him on the train for the big smoke and the final trimester of first year, the day before his birthday. I’d made note of the fact that the first day of term was his birthday, but denial ain’t just a river in Egypt friends, and it wasn’t until the day the reality of having adult children who live elsewhere hit me. It’s not a unique experience, and it’s one that is necessary in the journey of growing and launching these wee chickens of ours, but it still made my mama heart ache, This blog has recorded every birthday since he was two, and it feels remiss in this last birthday season post, to not acknowledge the change.

And so we shut down the birthday factory for another year. The recycling bin actually managed to keep up this year, for the most part, and the last of the wrapping has been packed away. The cake tin is empty, and I may or may not have snacked my way through the leftover hard icing. Now to breathe for 12 months until the next birthday season – and the next 18th! How are we under a year out from having two adult children?