Saturday 30 March 2013

Happy Birthday to Boo!


It was Boo’s birthday earlier this week:  7 years of Boo on Planet Earth - in body if not in spirit!  She had a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, shared with Peeka, as their birthdays are about 4 weeks apart, and Boo only wanted to invite 3 friends.  ‘I only want my BFFs,’ she explained.  In the past I might have persuaded her to invite more people in the name of building social bridges, but I’ve come to feel that this has to work both ways in order to work at all, and Boo doesn’t get very many invitations.  So 3 BFFs it was, plus Peeka’s all-female band of beauties.  The girls enjoyed their party: Peeka made the most of her moment in the limelight and Boo just loved seeing her friends out of school, which happens rarely.  During Boo’s birthday song, as they brought in her cake with its 7 candles aflame, she let out a really loud and mischievous laugh, and when we had all finished singing, she shouted out, ‘I’m going to blow out them NOW!’  Those darn candles were tricky little things, and BFF#1 started blowing too, to help Boo get the job done.  Boo added, for clarification, ‘with a little support from [BFF]!’ which made us all chuckle.  What 7 year old uses the word ‘support’?!

On the day of her actual birthday, Boo was happy from the moment she woke up.  Days like these are so precious.  It’s not just because she is easier to manage when she’s in a good mood, though she really is, and the break from our daily battles and frustrations was, admittedly, most welcome!  No, the best thing about a happy Boo, for me, is the very knowing that she’s happy.  I spent most of Boo’s early years wondering what she was thinking, how she was feeling.  She was an enigma.  The extreme moods I could figure out, but unless she was very happy or very unhappy, I didn’t really know how to read her.  Now that she’s 7, I am beginning to get better at working out how she might be feeling, but she can still be a bit of a mystery to me and I get it wrong pretty often!

On her birthday, Boo was definitely happy.   I keep thinking about her birthday face and it makes me go all gooey-hearted.  She just couldn’t hide her delight.  She had no clue what her presents would be, because as much as I had tried to coax out of her what she would like, she gave me no inkling what to buy.  She had been asking repeatedly for a ‘Moshi Membership’ since her last one had run out about 3 weeks ago, and Grandad had volunteered to step in and make that happen, but nothing else had even been mentioned.  I’d just had to guess, and thankfully I guessed right.


At bedtime, the night before Boo’s birthday, she seemed pre-occupied, restless. This week at school, one of her classmates had tripped over another pupil and broken his arm, and Boo had been really shaken up by the sight of paramedics with stretchers and ‘medical stuff’ tending to him.  The whole class had obviously been really upset and concerned for their friend, and Boo’s support assistant reported that Boo had been particularly distressed by the incident.  I guessed that this was what was on her mind.  I snuggled up in bed with her and asked, ‘Y’ok Boo?’  No answer.  I thought I’d try to redirect her attention.  ‘Are you looking forward to being 7, Boo?’

‘Huuuuuuh,’ came her unhappy groan in reply; a pained, anxious expression on her face.  Her eyes began to fill up with tears. 

‘Are you worried about something?’ I asked, tentatively, because usually when Boo is upset, the last thing she wants to do is talk to me about it, and me asking about it is often met with angry shouting through gnashing teeth.  After a long pause, she turned to me, wide-eyed and fragile.

‘I’m worried that I won’t like my presents,’ wailed Boo.  At that moment, I got it.  We had been banging on about her birthday all week (her sisters for a lot longer than that!) because we were excited for her, but what we had actually done was put pressure on her, we’d made it too big of a deal.  She was anxious.  And, those birthday packages could contain anything!

‘Don’t worry Boo,’ I said, stroking her forehead.  If you don’t like your presents you don’t have to keep them.  You can swap them for something you do like.  She looked relieved, smiled at me and said,

‘You can go away now.’ 

So I did.

 The next morning, 6.20am came, and in lolloped Boo, quietly squeaking, ‘It’s my birthday…are those my presents?!’  She got straight to work, flanked by her inquisitive sisters, who were impatiently nudging her to get on with opening the next, and the next.  I love the way Boo opens presents.  She tears into the wrapping paper urgently then takes a few seconds to examine the contents.  She isn’t bothered by the social graces of gift-acceptance; if she doesn’t like it, she just sets it aside and moves on.  If she does like it, then time stands still, we must p-a-u-s-e.  She takes her time to study all the intricacies of the given thing, turning it over in her hands slowly, reading everything printed on the packaging.  If it’s a book, then she sets about reading it, there and then.  This makes her sisters very twitchy- they are too eager to see what else hides in pretty paper and get ripping!  Boo takes her own sweet time.  So, with this in mind, I saved about half Boo’s presents for her to open after school – we have enough trouble getting there on time as it is!  The big hit of the morning gift-opening session was a ‘My Little Pony’ Wedding Castle (they have boy-ponies now, you know!) complete with bride and groom.  She loved it so much that bride and groom had to accompany Boo to school, to be shown and told.


I knew that the fat envelope containing Grandad’s card and the longed-for Moshi Membership had to stay hidden until the end of the day, when all the gifts had been opened, the birthday tea eaten, the candles blown out and the cake shared.  There was no way we’d get through any of those traditions if Boo got her hands on that envelope – she would be glued to the computer and parting her from it would be messy.  In fact, to avoid the messiness, I had decided to keep quiet about it until the next morning, but then I cracked.  She asked and asked and I hated to see her disappointed puppy-face, so I told her that Grandad had sent the very thing she wanted, and she could play on her computer game first thing in the morning.  But Boo had to see it for herself.  I brought the card up for her to open and she was over the moon.  We talked about our rules for waking up (stay in your own bed except if you need the toilet, try to go back to sleep if it’s before 6am, if you can’t sleep you can read, no DS or other gadgets before 6am, no computer before 6am) and said goodnight.

That night was a rough night, with Peeka, mainly.  All the girls have had snotty colds and coughs this week – Pips had had the day off school after being up most of the previous night with a high temperature and a persistent bark.  So there were various gettings-up to sprinkle Olbas oil on pillows, blow noses, administer medicine and refill bottles of water.  Peeka woke us up with her thoroughly miserable crying a couple of times so Mr BooHoo had gone to her and fallen asleep next to her in her single bed (oof).  He woke up in agony, welded to the sharp edge of the bed-frame, at about 3am, and was shuffling back to our room when he saw that Boo’s light was on.  


He peeped around her door and found… no Boo.  Her new 250 piece jigsaw puzzle had been opened and completed -it was displayed proudly in the centre of her bedroom floor- but Boo herself was nowhere to be seen.  Then he heard music from downstairs, and upon investigation, he found Boo, sat at the computer, playing Moshi flippin’ Monsters.  He turned it off and frogmarched Boo back up the stairs.  This was when I woke up.  What a racket.  Boo was not even slightly amused that her fun had been so abruptly curtailed and the two of them were having a very loud argument about it.  It took me half an hour to talk her down from possibly the angriest I have ever seen her, to a point where she could be calmly unhappy.  I lay next to her and rubbed her tummy until she stopped crying.  I woke up about an hour and a half later, aching all over from lying right on the edge of the bed with Boo’s feet on my legs, and staggered stiffly back to my own bed.   

We managed to lie in until 8.30 after all the comings and goings in the night – for a change, the kids were as exhausted as we were!   Boo struggled to wake up, having missed so much sleep, but when kisses and sunshine streaming in through her window failed to rouse her, all I had to do was whisper in her ear, ‘If you get up now and have some breakfast, you can play on the computer afterwards,’ and she was out of bed like a shot! 

Funny Boo. 

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