Cue the music for the closing ceremonies of the Mommy Olympics. The annual games take place every year between October 31 and November 2: the back-to-back, high-expectations holidays of Halloween and my daughter’s birthday. True, her actual birthday is tomorrow, but her party was today. After the blitz of the last 72 hours, the Olympics are substantially complete. We’ll leave the balloons up through tomorrow and open more presents, but it will be a relaxed and easy day. The highlight will be our annual trek down the street to the hospital where she was born six years ago. The nurses on the Labor and Delivery floor will smile and indulge my sentimentality. One will obligingly agree to take our family portrait by the hallway clock as the minute hand shifts subtly to 12:03 pm.  Then we’ll look in the window of the nursery at the tiny, ruddy newborns. My husband and I will say to our children “that’s how big you were when you were born!” Then he and I will look at each other in that way that says, all at once, “thanks to God,” and “we did it,” and “we’re doing it” and “how can it be six years since we had her?” and “my, what a big adventure this life is.”

Juxtapose this tender scene with its opposite experience, circa 10:30 pm last night. It was go-time to prep for my daughter’s birthday party this morning. Ten kids and ten parents were coming at 10 a.m. My husband and I knew that the morning would be beserk and that we’d get nothing accomplished with our amped-up kids underfoot. So last night he was tying strings to about 25 balloons and taping them to the ceiling while keeping an ear out for our finally-sleeping, sugar-saturated kids.  We missed their normal sleep window because we were out on their first-ever neighborhood trick-or-treating romp. One stick of a bite-sized KitKat goes a long way at 7 p.m.

Meanwhile, crazy-yours-truly was outside in the pitch black, rainy night, bagging about thirty piles of leaves I’d raked earlier in the day. The weather was supposed to be nice today for the party so I’d resolved to unsheath our yard from its Christo-like wrap of slick, moldy leaves. My leaf-piles were hard-won from the start due to the constantly-interrupted raking and then the re-raking when the leafy mounds became my children’s obstacle course. At my own peril, I often choose to give my kids their joy. I’m like a credit card I run up to the limit. I get the immediate gratification of my kids’ radiant glee and beautiful embrace of the present. The crushing interest rate is the extra work caused by my self-indulgence. Champagne taste on a beer budget.

At around 9:30 pm, I suited-up in my long black raincoat and headed out to the front curb where three sopping leaf piles awaited me. I peeled off a gossamer cornstarch leaf bag from the roll provided by the City that’s hurled into our yard like the Sunday paper. As I shoved armfuls of wet leaves into the bag, a car approached and parked about fifty feet away. The white headlights glaring at me ended any denial that it really was raining hard.  Three of the car’s doors opened and out popped one male and two female twenty-somethings.  The girls were wearing party boots and their heels clicked as they ran up the sidewalk to get out of the rain. “This way!” the guy called to his companions. Clearly their destination was not my octogenarian neighbor’s house.  I kept bagging.

A half-hour later, I moved on to my next and most-formidable arena: the back yard, home to the three-story shedding pine and giant maple tree. As I grabbed handfuls of pine needles and slimy red leaves, I discovered where the twenty-somethings had gone: to the townhouse two doors over. The house, a rental, changed tenants recently for the first time in five years. The new tenant likes to party. As soon as the calendar flipped into October, for example, he installed a fright-wig of orange Halloween lights atop his deck railing. My kids like to look at it out the window as they don their p.j.s at night. Now, finally having arrived at Halloween night, the deck lights were fulfilling their festive destiny. In the orange glow were the big-haired silhouettes of  about twenty drunk people who were taking advantage of a brief break in the rain. “I was shocked! I mean, shocked!!!”, one girl bellowed to enthusiastic claps, snorts, and guffaws. Eavesdropping in the pitch-black of my yard, I was full of myself. Full of judgement, full of envy, full of self-righteousness. And full of muddy, wet relief to be older, with children, at home. “They have no clue that I’m out here bagging leaves in the dark like a crazy person for a reason. My daughter’s party! At 10 am!” my mind chirped back. In their carefree revelry, they had no clue what it means  to be the hardworking, dedicated mom of a birthday girl.

“Hey!” One of them shouted over the din of the party. “Tree ninja!”

“Tree ninja, tree ninja,” I mindlessly echoed in my mind, waiting for the chuckling follow-up of another partygoer. I grabbed another bag and glanced up at the windows of our house, glowing golden yellow. Inside, I could see my husband standing on a chair taping balloons to the ceiling. He had the unmistakable posture of someone with a fresh neck crick.

Tree ninja. Tree ninja.

TREE NINJA????

It was me. I was the tree ninja. They were talking about me. Tree ninja. Tree ninja. How dare they??? And…how funny. Sure, “leaf ninja” would have been funnier, but I’ll take what I can get.  Hadn’t they’d given me my first Halloween costume since I became a mom?

When I hauled the last of the thirteen stuffed, shredded, food-based leaf bags back to the curb, I noticed that the twenty-somethings’ car was still parked near our house. I contemplated peppering their windshield with some dum-dums from our Halloween bucket as a thank-you. But I knew that as soon as they turned the ignition, their headlights would illuminate the bulging bags of the tree ninja’s labor. They might misinterpret my gesture, and the Budweisers may inspire mischeif on All Hallow’s Eve.  I couldn’t risk it.  I went back inside and started in on the remaining ten items on my pre-bedtime birthday-prep list. Sometime between tasks 1 and 10, the twenty-somethings returned to their car and stole into the night.

Lined up in my freezer are 20 bags of chicken stock. I’m gearing up for the cold weather that’s suddenly upon us now in mid-October.  My kids have been sick already this school year, but not as much so as this time last year.

1. Thank you for my kids’ growing immunity.

We’re in Asheville visiting my inlaws this weekend. The drive yesterday was over 6 hours in the rain. While my husband drove, I used all my wits, plus every cheap drug-store toy I could grab, to repair my kids’  fraying morale in the back seat. We ate things we don’t normally have in our house, in all of its carbohydrate and sugary goodness.

2. Thank you for pharmacies that sell food and toys.

I overbooked my morning yesterday before our noon departure. Schedule denial rivals only caffeine as my most addictive drug. In three hours’ time, I woke, fed, and clothed the kids, took them to their schools, hit the store, filled the gas tank, went to the bank, came home, shut down the house, packed the family, and then made snacks and lunch for the drive before picking the kids up again. I didn’t have time to get in the hour of work I’d assigned myself for the morning. The night before I’d been up late working and had hoped for a little more polish on what I’d drawn. No time. I emailed my work to the architect I do consulting for. I wrote, ‘Here it is, more to come tomorrow.” When we got to my inlaws’, we got our overtired kids in bed, and at 10 pm I finally had a chance to check email. There was a note from my colleague about what I’d done. It read, “Looks good. Keep going.”

3. Thank you for advance work credit with an old colleague.

My son’s current obsession is pendulum clocks. My inlaws have three, only one of which works. My son runs from clock to clock, beseeching the nearest tall-person to open the glass door and get it going again. His cheeks jiggle when he jumps up and down in eager glee.

4. Thank you for my son’s name for clocks: “tick-tock time machines.”

My father-in-law’s hard of hearing. His phone ringer is turned up so high, you can hear it all over the house. It’s an exciting ring, kind of like an electronic cowboy song. As in hook your thumbs in your chap loops and kick your legs out from side to side. My mother-in-law yells “Get it! get it! Get it quick!”

5. Thank you for a husband who, upon hearing this ridiculous ring, joins me in pumping my devil-horn hands in the air like metal heads at a Motley Crue concert.

Amen.