The World’s Most Grueling Competition

I’m not necessarily saying I’m competitive or anything, but I like to win. If you beat me at Monopoly, I’ll train bees to attack you. I like boxing with my 7-year-old son because I can beat him at LEAST 78% of the time. He’s a pansy (at least for now). I always finished exams first when I was in school, whether I knew the answers or not. Being first was more important than performing well. Same with sex. I ALWAYS win. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, my wife IS pretty much the luckiest woman on the planet.  I remind her all the time.

OK, so maybe I AM a little bit competitive, which is why I hate my kids for having birthdays. Let me clarify here- I don’t hate my kids as people (usually), and I love celebrating their birthdays. But celebrating their birthdays in SOUTH AFRICA is a nightmare worse than the one I had where I was a T-Rex and I somehow got poop on my hand and I was trying desperately to reach the soap dispenser in the public washroom but only succeeded in bashing my head against the mirror over and over again, knowing that bacteria would be the cause of my own extinction. If you’re a germophobe like I am, you’ll feel my pain.

Here’s the problem- kids birthday parties in South Africa are over the top. Like, Jim Carrey’s acting in Batman Forever over the top. In Canada, you drop your kids off at the bowling alley, some stranger’s house, or the strip club and get out of there as quickly as you can, laughing at the poor parent who has to deal with everybody’s crappy kids for 2 hours while you get to go on a romantic date shopping for toilet paper and hemorrhoid cream at WalMart. Here though, the parents join the party.

Back home, if you forget to plan an activity, you can just give the kids a giant ball of barbed wire and tell them to make ponies or whatever because kids are hilariously stupid and will believe whatever you tell them. But in South Africa, everything needs to be perfect because you’ll have several sets of adult eyes searing into your soul, watching, judging, knowing that your party isn’t nearly as good as the one they just threw.

The first party we got invited to was at an outdoor play place. These are really popular in South Africa. You rent out an entire playground and let the kids go nuts while the adults get loaded. Oh ya, they also bring drinks for the parents at South African birthday parties. And they braai- which is kind of like our BBQs in North America, but a kajillion times better.

The mom had made this insane, 3-tiered My Little Pony cake. You know that feeling you get when something is so ridiculously exquisite that you become overwhelmed with emotion and just want to punch a baby? That was this cake. There were also custom water bottles with the birthday girl’s name on them, an approximate butt-ton of crafts, and individual party packs for all the kids that were so impeccably decorated they made Martha Stewart look like a dirty back-alley whore. And to top things off, the dad was cheerfully braaing, making the art of skillfully not screwing up grilled meat look as easy as boxing a 7-year-old (cause like I told you, 7-year-olds are REALLY bad at boxing).

I’ve never seen a party like it. More effort went into that one day than I’ve ever put into my entire life.

And here’s the thing: ALL the kids’ parties here are like that. We went to several more, and each one was as intimidating as the first.

How the balls was I going to win at THIS??????

I can’t bake cakes. I can’t decorate. I can’t braai. I can barely remember not to bite my own tongue when I eat, and just the other night I spent several minutes locked out of my house because I forgot you have to push our front door, not pull (in my defence, there are no signs on our door to remind me). But I AM good at paying people to do stuff for me.

If you think I didn’t try to do all the above for my kids’ parties, you don’t know me. I’d usually be content to just buy a crap-ton of paint for the kids to huff, feed them some leftover beer, and call it a day. But this is South Africa, and I couldn’t disappoint the locals. Because my wife and I get it on at approximately the same time each year, our kids have birthdays pretty close to each other. We had not one, but two parties to plan.

I’m not going to get into all the embarrassing details of how overboard I went, but we had this:

I’m not good at baking cakes. But I’m good at paying for cakes.

And I did this:

…because inflatable dinosaur costumes aren’t just for role play night anymore.

And then we did this:

The blow-up Elsa doll I ordered wasn’t what I was expecting. So we used her for the party instead.

And this:

Buckets and buckets of birthday competition.

Oh ya, and we also had mother flippin ponies, ya’ll:

We would have had grizzly bear rides, but they were all booked that day. Also, the guy on the left has had enough of my crap.

Candy buffets are a thing in South Africa because nobody here has heard of diabetes, so we candy buffeted the crap out the party and put out enough other food to summon the ghosts of John Candy and Chris Farley, because that’s what people do here. And then I cooked the living badongles out of a pile of proper boerewors rolls, which are kind of like hot dogs, but way less awful and butthole-y.

And just in case that wasn’t enough, I made sure there were enough drinks to make all the parents drunk enough that they didn’t notice if I forgot to do anything awesomely.

So did I win? Probably not. Because Kate and her flippin’ flawless cake that she made with her own two hands is still seared into my memory as the pinnacle of perfection. But I have a year to plan my counter-attack. So all you class moms, please consider this formal notice- I’m coming at you next year. Bring your A-game.

Also her. She’s coming for you too. You should be terrified.

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