Birthday Boys

When I tell people that my 2 boys have the same birthday, despite being 2 years apart in age, I get some very different responses.  

The one I never quite know how to answer is: 'Oh, no, that's awful for them!' It is?  Gosh, how terrible of me to have inflicted this on them...  Oh wait, there was nothing I could actually do about it!  What exactly do people who think this is such a bad thing expect me to do about it?  And why would it be such a bad thing?

No worse surely than having a Christmas birthday, which has always struck me as kind of hard for people.  But I don't think I would point this out to them! Again, it's not like they had any say in the matter and they just have to make the best of it! For example, a friend whose son has a late December birthday, always holds his party in November, just to make sure it's separate.  

A lot of people respond more positively and think it's a huge novelty!  We are sometime asked how we managed this.  Well, just count back nine months from September 9th, it's not a huge mystery really!  No, we didn't intend to have 2 babies with the same birthday, but, here we are! In fact, we had assumed there was a large chance of us having further miscarriages before having a second baby; we had 3 before Matthew was born. Thankfully, this wasn't the case, but we had assumed there might be a bigger age gap.

For the boys, I don't think it makes any difference.  They are now old enough to know that this is not typical and to explain, as Adam puts it: 'we are brothers but we are not twins.' Because the age gap is 2 years, Matthew genuinely doesn't know any different and doesn't remember Adam not being around or having a solo birthday.  For obvious reasons, we weren't even with him on his second birthday, but we had a party for him in August (I was the size of a whale at this stage...) and he had a grand day with his grandparents while his brother was being born.

For the last 3 years we have held joint parties as we were able to keep things quite low key.  But of course once they are at school, kids get invited to loads of parties and are exposed to all kinds of things that they want on their birthday!  And last year's joint effort was tricky, as 3 year olds and 5 year olds don't necessarily respond well to the same activities.  Example: the 3 year olds held on to the parcel at Pass the Parcel and were quite bemused by the concept of giving away this great present someone had just handed them. At this point most of the 5 year olds were freaking out: 'Pass it ONNNNNNN! PASS IT ONNNNNNN!" It was fine, but a bit stressful...!

So, 7 kids tomorrow at home for Adam's 4th Birthday Party: Pass the Parcel, Musical Statues, decorating cupcakes and eating chicken nuggets and chips.  Sorted.  10 kids on Thursday at Kidzone, the local soft play centre: manic running and climbing, followed by more chicken nuggets and chips and cake.  And, the big present for me on Thursday: go home to an empty, clean house and have no clean up to do!

They each got very different presents as they are very different boys and they will have completely separate parties, which will hopefully assuage the people who somehow think we are mean for having them on the same day...