I wanted to like my birthday surprise … really, I did

I’m having an extremely difficult time figuring out exactly how I want to approach writing about this, because the potential for me to come off sounding like a total dick is enormous—perhaps even unavoidable. In fact, if I were to add a subtitle to this entry, that subtitle would be: “Maybe the reason I didn’t is that I’m a total dick … and, hey, what’s my therapist’s phone number again?” Either that or, “You really shouldn’t forget to take your Wellbutrin twice a day as prescribed, particularly on days when you don’t want your family to think you’re a dick.”

For several weeks, Wonder Woman and the kids had been alluding to the plans they made for my 39th birthday, the specifics of which they had managed to keep secret right up until game time Saturday—and for that alone, I should give them some serious credit, because it seems almost unfathomable to me that a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old could both manage to keep this one under their hats for such a long time.

Based on their apparent excitement about the secret plan, I was rather intrigued, and was very much looking forward to celebrating my birthday with the three of them. I also was excited that my birthday fell on a Saturday this year, because, hey! Saturday!

Things got off to a lovely start. Wonder Woman rose with the kids and told me to sleep in for a bit. When I finally did open the bedroom door at around 8 a.m., each of them meandered in to hit me up with some hugs and kisses and wish me a happy birthday. Wonder Woman then made French toast for breakfast, which is my favorite. So far, so good.

At the breakfast table, the kids were just about jumping out of their skin to tell me what the secret birthday plan was … so Wonder Woman finally unchained them.

“We’re going to CoCo Key!” said Zan.

“CoCo Key, Daddy!” said Jayna.

Huh? CoCo wha …?

“Zan knew how much you loved Key West, so he thought it would be fun to go here for your birthday,” Wonder Woman explained while placing in front of me her Macbook, which displayed the CoCo Key website. And I am going to provide you with the link to that website in just a moment … but first, I want you to imagine, if you will, that it is your 39th birthday, and that you are a silly, silly man … and because you are a silly, silly man, you had assumed for some time now that whatever secret plan your family had concocted for your birthday would be one whose primary purpose was to provide you with a semi-relaxing, “Me”-centric day that would include family fun and some kind of birthday celebration. You might even have held out hope for a little birthday canoodling with the wife once the kids were tucked away for the night.

And if you had been envisioning the aforementioned scenario for several consecutive weeks, you might feel a bit thrown when instead it turns out that your birthday surprise consists of taking your children on an overnight excursion to a local hotel whose main attraction is CoCo Key, an indoor water park. (And there’s that link I promised.)

So … we have reached the point in my tale at which there is a big ol’ fork in the road. Some of you will be inclined to turn down the road marked “What A Wonderful Surprise For Your Birthday! I Would Love That!,” and some of you will be inclined to turn down the road marked “What A Wonderful Idea … For Your Child’s Birthday, Or Some Occasion Other Than Your 39th Birthday! I Would Love That … As Long As I Knew About It In Advance And Had Time To Mentally Prepare Myself For Such An Undertaking!”

And it truly, no bullshit, saddens me to report that, not only do I travel the latter road, but I am in the far left lane with an E-Z Pass mounted on the windshield and the gas pedal pinned to the floor. And for that, I am sincerely sorry, because it would be so much better for me and my wife and my kids if my temperament was such that a surprise birthday adventure to CoCo Key made me say “Hot diggity damn! I’m loco about CoCo!”

But, OK, I could see that the kids were incredibly excited, and I was quite sure Wonder Woman had nothing but the best of intentions, so I forced myself to make a quick mental shift … the first step of which was taking the “relaxing birthday” vision that for days had been lounging around in my head and kicking it out on its idyllic ass.

And I swear, I embraced the new plan. I was ready to roll with it. Unfortunately, there were some mitigating matters that gummed up the works—most notably the recently pukey Jayna, who we had thought was back to her old self, but who seemed particularly out of sorts again: whiney, weepy, cranky, tired and complaining of a sore throat. This caused Wonder Woman to contemplate postponing the whole thing, which was an option neither of us felt good about in light of how excited the kids were. Fortunately for them, it turned out that it was too late to cancel our hotel reservation, and since Jayna didn’t have a fever, and was begging to stick with the original plan, we decided to give it a whirl; worst case scenario was one of us staying at the hotel with Zan (who for weeks had been fixated on staying at a hotel), and the other heading home with Her Royal Highness.

Now, if you’re going to lure bathing-suit-and-flip-flop-clad people to your enormous, tropical-themed, indoor water park in the middle of January, you damn well better keep that bitch nice and toasty, am I right? Surely, that is the lynchpin of the entire operation, and surely the architects of fun responsible for CoCo Key would have recognized that and, as such, made it their top priority. Or so I assumed.

Well, apparently, CoCo Key’s heating system wasn’t designed to deal with a colder-than-fuck mid-January day in New England, so, while CoCo Key was many things—big, crowded, messy—one thing it most definitely was not was warm enough to allow a person to comfortably walk around half naked and wet in the dead of winter. This was evidenced by the fact that, 15 minutes after we entered, Jayna’s lips were blue.

If there was one particularly positive thing about our time at CoCo Key, it was that Zan loved it. He had a ball. Outfitted with his YMCA swimming bubble—which he insisted on wearing despite the fact that the kiddie pool he was in maxed out at 18 inches—he slid down one of the small waterslides over and over and over again, and seeing him have so much fun doing it definitely made me feel better about the circumstances.

Finally, Wonder Woman and I agreed that it was too cold to remain there any longer, so we bundled up the kids and hoofed it back to our room, where we then had a couple hours to kill before meeting my mother, sister and brother-in-law for my birthday dinner, which Wonder Woman had booked at the hotel’s restaurant. And it was during our pre-dinner downtime that the experience kind of lost its shine, because the out-of-sorts Jayna was all up in everyone’s grill with the whining and crying and screaming. It also was during this downtime that she and Zan invented a new game that I like to call Let’s Fight Over Who Is Going To Use The Key Card To Open The Hotel Room Door.

Eventually, we were all seated for dinner in the restaurant, which was a lot of fun for everyone except Jayna, who was a big, overtired, floppy rag-doll of discontent. Fortunately, my Mom was more than happy to hold her for much of the meal.

By the time dinner ended, Jayna was unconscious, so we bade our guests farewell and retired to our room for the night … at which point, of course, Zan decided he didn’t want to stay overnight after all. Eventually, we were able to talk him off of leaving, but he then got upset that we had failed to bring with us any books to read to him at bedtime. Luckily for him, I was in the Army, where I learned to improvise, adapt and overcome—which is why, moments later, I was lying in bed next to him and reading to him from my BlackBerry some low-rent story housed at the hastily discovered website Bedtime.com (and to the owner of that domain: dude, those amateur stories are cute and all, but you could make a small fortune selling that domain name to a bed manufacturer. I’m just sayin’.).

Thankfully, Zan soon fell asleep, and Wonder Woman and I weren’t far behind. And because it wasn’t even 9 o’clock yet, we were on track for one of the most substantial nights of sleep we’d had in a while—which we would have had if not for the SLAMMING and SLAMMING and SLAMMING of the adjacent hotel-room doors, which SLAMMED and SLAMMED and SLAMMED all night long courtesy of the college hockey team that was sharing the floor with us. Thus, we spent the night sleeping in 15-minute increments, and rose feeling more tired than when we went to bed.

But at last, morning came, and we could go home. “Then maybe I’ll get to do a little relaxing,” I thought to myself—a thought that once again was smashed into oblivion when I raised the blinds and discovered a full-on blizzard raging outside. So, after a white-knuckle ride home on highways and backroads that had not yet seen a snowplow, we arrived at home, and by late afternoon, I was outside shoveling a foot of snow.

When I was saying goodnight to Zan, I thanked him for my special birthday, and asked if he could tell that I liked it. “Yep,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I replied. “How could you tell?”

“Because of how much you were smiling and having fun.”

I am very, very relieved that he was left with that impression, because I know how excited he was about coming up with the idea.

Unfortunately, I knew that Wonder Woman clearly was not left with that impression (I hadn’t complained, but I was pretty sure my “Yes, I’m really enjoying this” performance was far from Oscar-worthy) … so, when what was left of me collapsed on the couch next to her last night, I told her I felt really bad that I wasn’t able to get truly excited about the plan that she had come up with for my birthday, and I meant it. I wish doing things like taking the kids for an overnight trip to CoCo Key felt like effortless joyrides to me, but they don’t; they feel fun, but also demanding and labor-intensive … which is fine. Really. It’s not that I don’t want to do those things, or that I am unable to enjoy myself when we do them—it’s just that “demanding” and “labor-intensive” weren’t the adjectives I had been expecting to attach to my birthday.

And I know her feelings were hurt, and I know she feels bad that I was disappointed, and that makes me feel like the dick I probably am. And I just hope she knows that, although I didn’t necessarily love the plan itself, I completely love the fact that I have a wonderful wife and two wonderful kids who wanted to do something special for me for my birthday. That, for me, was the real birthday gift in all of this.