"What were you thinking?!"

Due to some rather excellent timing, I'm one of the lucky moms that has almost back-to-back birthdays to celebrate in the household. This is the first year we get to celebrate my youngest two children's birthdays spaced a mere 9 days apart from one another. It is making for an interesting dynamic, and although I am blessing the fact that all my saved baby clothes have fit in the right season, I'm having second thoughts about the hullabaloo of consecutive birthdays which we now get to experience year after year.

But this post isn't really about the woes of too-close birthdays. It's actually about balloons; birthday balloons, and the juxtaposition of balloon ecstasy against the despair of balloon death. You see, last week, when it was our youngest's first birthday, I made a special trip to the store to get a large happy-looking mylar balloon. It was shaped like a birthday cake, complete with candles standing up along the top. I don't usually get balloons for birthdays, but I thought it would be a nice touch. My almost-5-year-old was ecstatic when I brought it home, and enjoyed showing it to his baby brother. It can't have been more than an hour later that he came to me very apologetically to confess that, despite daddy's warning not to play with the balloon, he had taken it into the kitchen where the ceiling fan was lazily spinning, and there it met its demise. We tried to patch the hole with packing tape, but it was too late, and it would barely stand upright on the floor. Despite his mistake, I was truly proud of my boy in that he made confession so readily instead of trying to cover his tracks, and I told him so, but I still ached inside at the waste of money and effort.

So this week, when I took my three boys to the grocery store, I promised my almost-5-year-old that if he was very good, he could pick out his very own birthday balloon at the end of our trip, even though it was two days early. He was, truly, very good. The only trouble he gave was the every-five-minute question as to whether it was time for his balloon, yet. But the magic moment finally arrived, and despite an accidental escape to the grocery ceiling and a subsequent rescue by an obliging store clerk, we had a large Sesame Street bus-shaped mylar balloon riding merrily with us on the way back home.

Not an hour later... do you already see where this is heading? I thought we had learned our lesson. I thought we had made solemn vows not to release the balloon to the mercy of ceiling fans or do anything deleterious or detrimental to the fragile membrane that is a mylar balloon. But as I was setting the dinner table, I heard my 7-year-old reprimanding the almost-5-year-old for doing something with a screwdriver. Yes, he had punctured his balloon with a screwdriver. Again, I felt like tearing my hair out. Again, the packing tape came out, this time to much better effect. Again, I found myself wondering why I bother. "What were you thinking?" that common phrase of motherhood, actually escaped my lips, as ineffective as I know it is to even ask. I try not to use that expression any more, as I realize it always implies that someone wasn't thinking, and is therefore bordering on sarcasm, a big parenting no-no.

I'm glad my boy is curious. I'm glad he is daring. I'm glad he is adventurous. I can't wait to see what world changing discoveries his inquisitiveness will lead to. Meanwhile, I'm keeping the packing tape handy.