When a stranger calls
When responsibility-phobe Sophie White is in charge of a troop of other people’s children, things go wrong in a way no one could possibly have anticipated
We were no strangers to the kids-party situation. We had done this before. Still, as the morning sun slid under the blinds on that fateful day, a nameless dread crept into the pit of my stomach.
“It’ll be fine,” drawled Himself, already bored of my catastrophising. I was a woman on the edge. I made a list of the children who had RSVPd. Eighteen kids. I was about to be in charge of keeping 18 kids alive and unscathed for 120 minutes.
“We’re out of our f*cking depth here,” I clawed desperately at Himself. He looked withering. It was only 8am, and I had already slipped into the persona of the soldier cracking under pressure in those war movies dads like.
“We can barely manage our own children,” I whispered. We glanced at them; they looked serene, but then I noticed that Baby II appeared to have located a tray of chicken breasts that was now defrosting in his defiant little fists. “We’re screwed.”
Previously, we’d done the party at home, which had always seemed somehow safer and more contained, until the time we lost Baby II inside the house and the party descended into a panicked search, as the onlooking pre-schoolers logged the chaos to re-tell to their parents in a garbled, libellous version, later.
Kids’ stories are always a melange of facts, fantasy and YouTube. I could see them relating to their alarmed parents: “And then no one could find the baby and the mummy was screaming and then the dada did a yucky and “I was about to be put in charge of keeping 18 kids alive and unscathed for 120 minutes” the Lego robot saved the baby and we all had cake.”
After that, I knew it’d be best to transplant the party to one of those padded cells for hire, where there are ball pits and bouncing castles and wipe-clean surfaces. Sadly, I immediately made a rookie error. I neglected to do a head count during the wave of drop-offs, and was now uncertain how many children I actually had in my care, and therefore had no way of ascertaining if I was down a child.
The party raged around me as I clung to the edge of sanity, picturing the recriminations at collection time, not to mention the headlines, and the inevitable coldness that would ensue in the parents’ WhatsApp group.
Ironically, if I had spent fractionally less time worrying about whether I had lost a child, I might have noticed that we’d actually gained two. That’s right, we had two extra stranger children who had been dropped to the wrong party, and whom I had warmly greeted and whose parents I’d chatted to. Oi vey!
Thank Christ there was cake at this shindig. This easy cake is the perfect kids-party cake. You can use a mix of tins to make the shape of the birthday age — it fed 18, plus two extra stranger kids and some random parents.