It’s been a few days and my ears are just starting to drop after retracting into the quietest part of my brain over a loud, two hour, 5th birthday party on the weekend.

 
Chloe invited 18 of her closest friends to her party held at a local gym.

 
If you close your eyes, the sound of 18 kids running around a gym while screaming is exactly the same as 50,000 drunk adults at a play-off soccer game but when you open your eyes, everyone is sober and the kids are still screaming and running.

 
They only stopped running and screaming long enough to tattle tale, “Joey isn’t running or screaming!”

 
We played a game called “Freeze Tag” for about 12 seconds (the longest attention span of the remaining freeze-dancer—likely with professional training to have lasted that long).

 
I explained (or so I thought, I was basically shouting over top of even more shouting wishing I hadn’t put my whistle back in the drawer before leaving the house) “Boys and Girls, we are going to dance to the music (if anyone can hear it) and when the music stops, you freeze like a statue.”

 
This seems like an easy concept but about half of the kids continued running and screaming, a couple of the girls danced, scoffing at the idea of stopping for any reason, Chloe repeatedly pulled on the bottom of my shirt asking (in her yelling voice) “When can I open my presents?” which became the mantra of the party and I quickly realized was really the only reason we were having it at all.

 
One child cried when his Mom left then ran, screamed, danced, sang, laughed, ran and screamed the entire time she was gone but managed to cry again as she walked back in the door to pick him up making it impossible for her to believe he hadn’t been crying the entire duration of the party.

 
Then there’s the jail-break kid who was almost always trying to escape the party. Where were they going to go? It was freezing outside and I had all of the coats. I know they saw their window to freedom and I was kicking myself for not coming up with it first, but think of the big picture kid, we have warm pizza and a cake with the characters from Frozen that only 17 of your friends have poked at to see if it was an actual photograph or real icing despite me shouting (I had to, all the cool kids were doing it), “This is not a real photograph! This is icing!”