A little less than a month after our arrival in Dhaka last year, Atticus turned 7. We had a little family birthday and a fun little time at Pizza Hut, but we were all still learning the ropes of life in Dhaka, and it was a fun, but certainly, foreign-feeling birthday.
This past Wednesday Atticus turned 8 and this time around he was right at home. He has really become quite a Dhaka-kid and this birthday gave us a chance to see how he is really in his element here now. For one, he loves school this year. Last year he had a hard time adjusting and was still kind of the new kid, but this year he was no longer new and has lots of friends – which means he could have a real party! We decided it was a great chance for us to let our inner dorks fully out, and we threw a pirate party (No, not the Swedish Politcal party).
The first step was the invitations, which of course, we got crafty with. In our usual DIY fashion, we downloaded Pirate font, printed out invites, then dragged tea bags over them to make the paper look old. Then we burned the edges for another level of awesomeness. We rolled the invitations and tied them with some string to hand out. They turned out fabulous (if we don't say so ourselves) – and created quite a pre-party buzz around the school. Here are some pics:
The party was on the day after Atticus' actual birthday, since his birthday was on Wednesday and Thursdays are a half day at his school. So, basically, he got two full days of birthday fun. On his actual birthday, he took a cake to school (the one pictured at the top) and had it with his friends. Then he got to choose whatever he wanted for dinner and he opted for the Japanese restaurant. This is his favorite restaurant, so not a big surprise. As we were walking along to get to the restaurant we were struck with how comfortable he was strutting along the loud, busy streets of Dhaka. He knew right where he was going, navigated around puddles, rickshaws, sewer holes in the ground, and other random obstacles as if he was strolling alongside a bubbling brook. He is a Dhaka kid now, and this is his ‘hood.
Once in the restaurant we had a tasty dinner as always and he got to enjoy one of his favorite things there- fancy orange juice (you know he likes fancy…). Here are a few pics from his birthday dinner:
After dinner we let him open the presents from the family. We pooled everyone’s money this year and got him the two things he has been asking for over the last many many weeks, and some socks. He wanted a radio-controlled helicopter (Jon wanted this too, actually) and an electronic light saber. Both were pretty pricey, especially with the import tax on the light saber (toys from the US are really expensive) – but with everyone’s money together we got to let him have what he wanted. It was a good decision. He was thrilled, and cried out “Thank you so much!” (what a polite kid!) and has been enormously pleased with his presents. Well, he was less pleased with the socks…
So his birthday was fun, but the really big event was yet to come. We applied our usual enthusiasm to the party, and made a big Jolly Roger flag (which is always good to have around anyway), painted a big pirate (who we decided to call Steven the Pirate and who was on on the hunt for some Pirate booty) for pin-the-parrot-on-the-pirate and decorated up the apartment.
We also blew up some balloons.
As we tried to finish up with some final preparations for the party two of the kids decided to break with the usual bangladeshi tradition of arriving late and showed up a half hour early, d'oh. Jon was able to amuse them with his pirate talk and swordfighting skills until the rest of the kids showed up - late (of course). The fight didn't last long though as one of the treacherous little rascals pulled a gun on him and hollered out "say goodbye my little friend" ala Al Pacino in Scarface.
Finally after all of the kids showed up the party got going in earnest. We had planned four seperate games to keep the little pests occupied. The first game was a game where each team tied as many pirate sashes to a team member as they could. It was a good way to make use of the dozens of ornas (scarfs) that come with all of Sam's outfits. As soon as the game began we were immediatley reminded that 1) kids love to segregate by gender, which was especially bad in this case because there were far fewer girls at the party, and none of the boys would ever want to be on the "girls team," and 2) kids are incredibly loud. Everything kids do together seems to involve screaming at the top of their lungs (maybe they haven't learned to control their vocal chords?) and Atticus is often the loudest of the bunch.
We were amazed at how much louder they could get when they played Pin-the-Parrot-on-Steve. As each child was blindfolded, spun around and sent towards Steven, the children were screaming out directions in multilpe languages - some correct directions, and some incorrect. Then they began chanting in unison "yes, yes, yes" in attempts to confuse their friends into sticking the parrot in a bad spot. It got pretty intense. You could not hear any individual voices - just the chanting, not to mention the kid was blindfolded and the room was incredibly hot and crowded. We decided later that this may have actually been a form of torture, hopefully Amnesty International doesn't hear about our party. The pic below illustrates some of the chaos.
Most of the kids...
Next we played a game that made them pass spoonfulls of water down a line. It turns out kids make a huge mess even with only a few spoonfulls of water. To close the games, we unleashed the hundred or so balloons we had blown up and informed them some of them had candy in them. Then 12 children began screaming and running and popping balloons on wet floor for about ten minutes. We're sure the other people in our neighborhood loved that.
After the chaos of the balloon popping it was time to sit them down and feed them (something besides sugar, that is). We had pizza in circle by lantern light, because of course the power had gone out. These kids all live in Dhaka though, so a little power outage doesn't even phase them. After some kids finished eating pizza and others were still eating, the kids passed the lantern around and told stories. It was pretty adorable.
After that we moved them all to the table for the pirate cake and ice cream.
Finally, they moved back into the living room to open presents. Atticus got a lot of loot - like ridiculously a lot. If you look at the mess on the table in the lower left of the picture below, and multiply it by about 200 all over the apartment, you can get a sense of the wake these kids left behind.
So then everyone's drivers started arriving and we had to make sure each kid got to the right parent, etc. As the kids left, the others occupied themselves with the THREE Nerf guns Atticus got as presents and various other weapons of destruction. The best though, was hearing one kid call out in his little British accent "Let's Shoot Steve!"
Despite all the mess, it only took about an hour and half to clean and sanitize the place. We didn't have any major injuries, no fights, and generally smooth going- especially impressive considering that all these kids had widely variant degrees of English proficiency.
So all in all it was a great party - in fact, several children said it was the best birthday they'd ever been to. Well, of course of it was, little one. We don't mess around.
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