Daisy's birthday

With 180 children on the compound, we end up with a lot of birthdays. Not quite 180 separate days because some are twins and triplets, but still. It’s a lot. 

They are all celebrated, but when you have two or three birthdays a week and the celebrations are all the same, they quickly start to blend together. With some of the children we are closer to, we try and give them something extra, more akin to a children’s birthday party at home. Yesterday was Daisy’s birthday, and in the spirit of being somewhere warm again, we threw a pool party… on our verandah… 

Daisy was found when she was a week old, wrapped in a plastic bag and left on a garbage pile in a local market. Though Noah’s Ark has social workers who investigate each child’s case when they come here, sometimes nothing can be found of a child’s family or situation. Daisy was one such case. Where she came from, who abandoned her, where her family is now, why she was left—it is all a mystery. 

She came to Noah’s Ark on March 11, 2014. It was Christian’s birthday, so as a “birthday present” she became his baby. He spent hours feeding her, caring for her, playing with her, teaching her how to walk, and showing her that she was loved and valued. 

Now, Daisy is the largest three-year-old I have seen in a long time. Seriously, my arms get tired when I hold her for more than a few minutes. She is tall and stocky and healthy. For awhile she never walked anywhere; instead, she half-ran, half-skipped wherever she was going, which was adorable on her cute little chubby legs. Now she has learned to pace herself a bit better and I am trying not to be disappointed by it. She talks and sings, though not as much as some of her friends of the same age. Her attention span is shorter than this sentence. But that’s normal for a three-year-old. 

We barely made it back from our travels in time for her birthday. Christian has thrown her a birthday party for the last two years and we didn’t want to disappoint, but our house was too full of suitcases to allow children to enter just yet. The solution? A pool party! It turns out five children can easily fit into two child-sized inflatable pools, and then magically they don’t care about coming inside anymore. 

A moment of honesty: A couple weeks ago while we were in the Netherlands and beginning to think about coming back to Uganda soon, I asked Christian, “Is it bad that I don’t miss the children?” I love the children, don’t get me wrong, but the break from work and constant people was better than I expected. The thought made me nervous about coming back because if I didn’t really miss them, would I be happy to see them? 

Thank God, the answer was yes. 

From Thomas helping me fill the pools bucket by bucket to Jaella’s quivering lip because she was so cold in the water, the afternoon was a blessing and a reminder of how to love well. 

Daisy

Jaella, 7 years, and cold

Josephine, 3 years

Christy, 10 years

Blessing, 2 years

After swimming, they sat down outside for cake and juice. We were cruel and watched them shiver for a minute before finding enough towels. Kids are cute when they shiver. 

Because we made them miss bath time in the children’s home, we considered them clean from swimming and put Daisy in her fancy birthday dress (which is actually her flower girl dress for next week, but she kept it relatively clean) and the rest in pajamas and went to the home for supper. 

After eating, the aunties always set up a table in the home especially for the birthday boy/girl. Some volunteers had distributed balloons, which added to the birthday mood. In a chorus of about a hundred children’s voices, we sang Happy Birthday, complete with the verses “How old are you now?” and “You look like an angel” (you know, just in case the answer to the previous verse was depressing).  

On the count of three, this toddler was given a giant knife to make the first cut in her cake. Don’t worry, there was plenty of adult supervision nearby. A handful of her closest friends came to the table with plates to collect pieces of cake to distribute among all the children in the home. The pieces are tiny, but with so many birthdays going on it adds up to plenty of sugar. 

Once everyone had finished their one or two bites of cake, it was time for presents. Some presents come directly from sponsors and some come from general donations given to Noah’s Ark. Children are given a certain number of presents depending age. Since Daisy was turning three, she got to open three presents. Many children like to hold up their gifts and show them off for everyone to see. Daisy was more interested in wearing her new headband and sunglasses and trying to eat her toy microphone like an ice cream cone. 

There was one more round of Happy Birthday, and then the celebrations were over. Christian brought her presents back home—I mean we brought her presents back to our home (because it’s the same one now, woohoo!)—so they wouldn’t get lost or broken or stolen or anything else that often happens to personal belongings when you are a toddler living with a hundred other people and can’t remember what belongs to you and what doesn’t. 

All in all, I’d say it wasn’t bad for our first time throwing a birthday party together. And if it was, well, with this many kids around we can get in lots of practice.