2020-21 Catch Up: Birthday Roundup

Our annual birthday cycle starts in August: Ingrid in August, me in September, Henry in November, Fritz in December, Karl in January, and Heidi in February.  I regret missing a couple of my usual birthday roundups.  Though I managed to capture Fritz and Henry, I failed the girls and Karl, so let's have a roundup on those.

After our awesome Yellowstone trip but before the dumpster-fire school year began, Ingrid turned eight!  She had a lovely but fairly uneventful year of seven, at least until COVID turned everything upside down.  She adored her second grade teacher, Mr. Friden, and did very well in everything except math, where she was falling so far behind that we thought she might qualify for intervention services.  This will be notable when we discuss her year of eight.  She got along with everyone at school but usually preferred to hang out with her neighborhood friends.  While we were seriously quarantined at the beginning of COVID, she taught herself to rollerblade and was the only child to love the bingo-grid of lame activities that the teachers assigned every day.  

Two anecdotes come to mind when I think back on Ingrid last year.  First, when distance learning was new and I was listening in on zoom school a lot, Mr. Friden asked a math question.  Ingrid raised her virtual hand and I give her my "you go, girl, way to volunteer!" look.  She gives the right answer and looks very pleased with herself.  Then the teacher asks her to explain how she worked it out, and she just says, "I guessed 9 because I like the number nine."  Oh, Ingrid.

And then at the Braden's cabin in August, she turned into a complete insane wild woman on the tube.  She wanted stunts so crazy that even Henry was put off.  At one point, he swim-limped off the tube and said, "I wanted to keep tubing but Ingrid is out of her goddam mind!"  She's so cautious -- until she's completely crazy.

For her birthday, we had our usual celebration at the cabin, then she had a party at home with her neighbor friends.  We made exceedingly time-consuming rainbow cake push-pops and had a bounce house in the yard.  

Fast forward to January when Karl turned 40!  We don't normally do much for adult birthdays but 40 was a big milestone.  Karl was so relieved that COVID eliminated any possibility of planning a large party for this event.  Instead, I booked us a night at the Hewing Hotel downtown, which had two main attractions: first, it looks like it was decorated by a very wealthy Viking; and second, their restaurant was running a very cool in-room dining experience.  Karl's parents kept the kids and we went out to celebrate pandemic-style.  The room was indeed decorated with classy herringbones and tastefully-framed axes.  For dinner, the restaurant had set up individual tables in hotel rooms on the first floor.  A server set a tray for each course outside the door and the TV in the room was loaded with video of the chef and sommelier talking about that course.  The food was delicious and Karl decided eating with no other people was the greatest COVID innovation after working from home.  Turns out, pandemic birthday was Karl's dream.

And then sweet Heidi turned six in February.  Karl was as sad about this as I was when Fritz turned four.  Since Heidi turned five just before the world shut down, she had basically spent her entire five year at home, and spent most of that time cuddling Dad.  He really did not want that baby to get any older.  She was a truly delightful kindergartener despite the unpredictability.  Hattie She get very anxious and does not usually respond well to chaos, but the default of extra time at home with Dad helped to anchor her and keep things on the rails.  The thing she most hoped for in starting kindergarten was to make more friends she could have playdates with -- all of her preschool friends seemed to live in other neighborhoods and have different schedules.  And she did!  She made the sweetest little buddies, especially Charlie and Hattie, whose moms are also awesome, which really facilitates the playdate thing.

For her birthday, she requested a marshmallow party, which was a theme I'd never considered.  I didn't know what I'd been missing!  There are so many marshmallow options!  I ordered mallows on Amazon, picked up fancy mallows from someone in Duluth on our way to Lutsen, had a friend's teenager make snowflake-shaped mallows for goody bags, and asked the local bakery for the craziest marshmallow cake they could come up with.  Heidi had a mix of neighborhood friends and school friends.  We had a bonfire and made s'mores, played marshmallow games, ate rainbow marshmallow cake, and went home in a haze of sugar.  It was every bit as sweet as our Heidi.