No Cookies For You!

(pictured, me at some birthday party of mine in a bowling alley) 

Let’s just talk about this picture real quick, even though it has little to do with the story. It’s such a weird photo, nobody is completely in focus, if you look closely, there is the ghost of my mother appearing in the back where the Barney poster is (she is completely alive, but this photo would say otherwise), and there is this monster child seemingly astralprojecting behind me.

Anyway,  I know I already have a birthday story up here. (See, Barbie At My Birthday) … But I have another unfortunate situation for you.

I don’t recall exactly what year this happened. Could have been first grade, but it could have been third grade.

It doesn’t really matter.

All that matters is that you understand and/or remember the importance of having your birthday fall on a school day.

Yes, it was cool if your birthday fell on a weekend or in the summertime. You get to wake up late, stay up late, and best of all, didn’t have to go to school on your b-day.

But really, it was much more rewarding to have your birthday within the calendar school year,  Monday-Friday.

Here’s why:

1. When you walk into school on your birthday, you were a superstar. Everyone wanted to say hi to you. Everyone wanted to wish you a happy birthday. Everyone wished they were you.
2. You got extra attention when they announce your name over the loud speakers right after the Pledge of Allegiance. If you had a cool class, they’d clap for you after the announcements.
3. Most importantly, you were be the most loved person of the day because you got to bring sweets.

Yes, the cookies, brownies, cupcakes, and other miscellaneous baked goods you got to bring on your birthday!! You just couldn’t possibly wait to grab that tupperware out of the TJ Maxx bag your mom gave to you to bring to school and pass them out to every one of your classmates. Even though having people sing “Happy Birthday” to you is probably the most awkward and harrowing experience every human goes through once a year, you loved it when you are passing out the brownies with frosting you were so freaking proud of.

You were the center of the attention.

You were the center of the world.

And you probably had left overs too.

Ah, joy.

But this didn’t happen for me on my seventh birthday.. or my eighth… sixth? Whatever. One year, it sucked.

The day before my birthday, my mom and I went to Stop and Shop to pick out what I would get to pass out to my class. In the bakery, I could’t decide what I wanted more.

The soft sugar cookies with the yellow and pink frosting and sprinkles?

Or the crunchy sugar cookies shaped like baseballs with green sprinkles?

My mom agreed to both.

Oh, happy day!

She carefully wrapped them in a plastic bag the morning of my birthday, and sent me on bus 15 with my older sister and the rest of the child hooligans I went to school with.

Everything was a-okay until we got to school. I held onto my cookies real tight and everything.

When the bus stopped and the doors swung open, I stood up real fast because I wanted to be the very first in the school, dammit!! (or, something like that). I stood, and the handles of the TJ Maxx bag somehow come untied, and all of my cookies slid from their flimsy plastic container and fell to the bus floor. As the rest of the hooligans exited the bus, they were trampled.

There was no salvaging my cookies.

I think I cried.

My sister, Brianna, gave me the saddest look from the back of the bus. She must have really felt bad- she usually pretended I didn’t exist in school.

This experience, like many I write about, was way more dramatic when I was a child. I felt defeated. I looked at the baseball cookies laying on the dirty bus floor, and literally felt all the future disappointment life would bring me.

My school-day-birthday was ruined.

If I didn’t have any cookies to share with my classmates, who the hell would even care it was my birthday?

Even though Brianna felt really bad that this happened, she reminds me about this a lot.