One Thing or a Mother: Baking, balloons and birthday madness in Worthing

I should have appreciated not having to spend hours in a venue that smells of feet, while 30 children ran around me screaming, high on life and sugar having consumed a lunch of 98 per cent biscuits and two per cent soggy carrot sticks.

I could have enjoyed the time I instead got to spend at home, relaxing with an Aperol spritz.

But that’s not what I did at all. Instead, I decided I had to compensate for the ‘lost party’, by spending the day and night before my daughter’s birthday making it as super duper fun as it could be.

I don’t know if it’s just a ‘me’ thing, a mum thing, or a parent thing in general, but any time spent doing nothing/relaxing is so guilt-inducing that it’s almost not worth it.

I can’t be succeeding as a parent, if I’m not chasing my tail at all times with imaginary steam coming out of my ears, right? Right?!

With this most illogical brand of logic employed, I decided this would be the year I would go big on balloons. I’d seen people on Facebook and Instagram posting pictures including balloon garlands, and if it’s on social media, it’s basically law that you must do it, too. I’m pretty sure that’s right, anyway...

‘It’ll be great’, I thought to myself as I happily clicked the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon to order a large, inflatable rainbow display one gin-infused Saturday night. ‘How long can it possibly take to blow up 85 balloons and fit them together on a garland?’, I reasoned.

The answer, as it turns out, is at least two hours. And during that time you will inevitably have developed RSI in your right bicep thanks to overusage of a balloon pump (any day now The Lancet will be calling asking me for a 3,000-word study on this little-explored medical phenomenon).

And you will have had to repeatedly explain to your husband in that singsongy voice we all adopt to convey things are great, when they absolutely are not, why this was such a fantastic idea.

But that wasn’t a challenge enough. No, no, not at all. I still had a cake to make.

I make a lot of cupcakes and other traybakes, and if I do say so myself, they always turn out pretty well.

But I’d always been too scared to ‘go bigger’ and make a proper birthday cake until now – a fear that was obviously justified...

Despite following the recipe exactly, what I ended up baking was two flat, dry, lemony rock-discs.

I could have used them in a game of birthday frisbee, but without the time or ingedients to try again, I had to style out the cake the best way I knew how. By using buttercream. And lots of it.

Oh, and some zero nutrition-value sweets for good measure. Because I needed something else to feel guilty about.

A large squirt of buttercream direct from the piping bag into my mouth gave me the energy boost I needed to finish the birthday preparation.

I wrapped our presents and cards. I wrapped presents and cards from everyone else, because they couldn’t bring them round in person this year.

Birthday banners were put up, and balloon garlands hung precariously from light fittings, and ta-da, I was ready for bed after midnight.

The antithesis of relaxed, yes, but I slept soundly (for five-and-a-bit hours until the excitable birthday girl jumped on me!) knowing I’d done my mummy best.