Grandparenting at a joint birthday party

Talk about a gift that keeps giving. 

Our grandson Elliott showed extraordinary time management skills in arranging to be born on Danielle’s birthday. That’s Danielle his grandmother. That, of course, means that we get a great combined celebration each year.

Joint birthday. From left to right:
birthday boy, birthday girl, un-birthday girl

This year was special in that Danielle’s was a birthday with a 0 at the end. The 7 at the beginning may have been even more significant, but we focused on celebrating the zero.

As for Elliott, he turned three.

One of the key preparatory tasks was to purchase suitable presents. And I really mean presents, in the plural. It was Elliott’s birthday, but we weren’t going to let his sister Matilda sit by and watch him enjoying gifts while she got nothing. 

In any case, it meant we were applying the reasoning of that fine logician Lewis Carrol. You may remember that he argues convincingly, or at least has Humpty Dumpty argue convincingly in Through the Looking Glass, that since there are more un-birthdays than birthdays each year, it’s much better to get un-birthday presents.

Humpty Dumpty’s incontrovertible logic:
Most years contain 364 more un-birthdays than birthdays

For once, I took the initiative in selecting Elliott’s presents. We ended up with two. One was a rather amusing toy truck, quite large and made of plastic, with lots of little compartments with transparent doors, behind each of which was a much smaller model, also of plastic, of different vehicles – cars, trucks, tractors, you name it. It was, of course, ludicrously unrealistic – the difference in scale between the truck outside and the vehicles inside had nothing to with the actual world. Even so, it struck me as fun, which made up for what in my view is the downside of plastic – it may be versatile but it has a flimsiness about it, a sense that it’ll never last, that leaves me feeling it’s just a tad second rate.

Metal, of course, is far better, a feeling which guided the selection of the second present. It was a large, chunky bulldozer toy, heavy, strong, with all the nobility that solid steel gives things. That in my view made the plastic surrealistic toy far less attractive, greater versatility or not.

Wow! This is amazing

Well, you know just where this is leading, don’t you? Yep. He couldn’t get enough of the plastic truck. He had tremendous pleasure taking all the little vehicles out, laying them out in a line or a circle or just bunched up together on the floor. Then, to my amazement, he had apparently pretty much equal pleasure, putting them all back. 

See how amazing it is?

As a kid, I had just as much pleasure taking things out of the place where they went when we’d finished with them. Putting them back? Not so much.

The superior metal bulldozer toy? He looked at it. He pushed it a bit. And then he went looking for his fun plastic truck.

And what did we get Matilda?

We got her an aid to communication with her brother, in the form of a pair of walkie-talkies. It turns out that it was more of a hindrance to communication than an aid, because in the age of the mobile phone, neither found it easy to adapt to the notion that you needed to push a button to speak and release it to listen. Something of a metaphor for life, I feel, since I think most of us would prefer to keep the button pressed permanently so we can just keep on talking and ignore what anyone else might want to say. I can’t remember who said that he liked having other people talking, because it gave him the time to decide what he was going to say next. He had insight. Or at least honesty.

This phone is weird. Just how does it work?

Of course, no birthday is complete without a party. The problem for Elliott is that he doesn’t live with us in Valencia so there weren’t many friends near here to invite. It didn’t matter though: he joined a friend in Hoyo de Manzanares, where he lives when not with us, for a joint celebration among kids, and he didn’t seem to mind that at our place, it was all adults. We had an excellent paella cooked superbly by a fine local restaurant and cakes from our excellent bakery, generously provided by Elliott’s parents. They do a fantastic range of mousse cakes, with prices to match, and we had a one with strawberry (as required by Elliott) and another with pistachio (which we’d decided was Danielle’s favourite).

Cake time, with Oana and Sheena
as well as the birthday and unbirthday people

The whole was washed down with several good wines and the animated company of a small group of friends invited by Danielle. That included our great friend Oana who, as I explained last time, originally turned up a week early, which earned her an unplanned paella, and then turned up again on the right day, to help us consume a planned one.

Uncle David accompanying Matilda with Toffee
See David’s camera? The good photos here are by him

Along with the friends, most of the clan gathered too: Matilda and Elliott’s parents, our son Nicky and daughter-in-law Sheena, as well as David and Michael, our other two sons, uncles of the grandkids. 

Uncle Michael with Elliott

An excellent birthday or un-birthday, for grandmother, grandson and granddaughter.

Birthdays are fun but can be exhausing
Sheena with Matilda, Nicky with Toffee

PS What was Danielle’s gift? She wanted clothes and we certainly weren’t going to choose them for her. So we decided we’d club together to get a gift token from the big department store in Spain – the Corte Inglés, since you ask – but then David came up with the wizard scheme of giving her the kind of gift token you can use in any shop you choose. That’s cash. Which we provided. In a nice card, of course.

PPS Last time the grandkids were here we were concerned because Max, our new (though not young) dog, of the classic Spanish race, the podenco, hadn’t got on with them. He’d even growled at them. So it was a delight to see them getting on far better this time – he’s more confident about living with us and has got used to them, so seems not to regard them as a threat any more.

You can imagine the relief…

Matilda getting on fine with Max
if finding it a little difficult to get him to do as she wants

Happy birthday, happy mistake

Not all mistakes are bad.

That was something I learned from a documentary I watched years ago, which introduced me to two people who struck me as highly likeable. 

They were Japanese mathematicians who started their careers in the years after World War II, not a good time for anyone Japanese to be looking for recognition on the world stage. Memories of all that bloodletting were simply too fresh. These two, though, did some maths that was so striking that whatever the reputation of their country, they couldn’t help but win an enviable one for themselves.

The one interviewed for the documentary was Goro Shimura. He was by then a highly respected mathematician working in the intellectual powerhouse that is the Instituted of Advanced Studies at Princeton University in the States (the place once graced by no less a person than Albert Einstein). He was talking about his friend and collaborator in maths, Yutaka Taniyama. You could feel his grief in talking about Taniyama who committed suicide in 1958, something which clearly still saddened Shimura several decades on. 

In the interview, what he said of his him was curiously revealing, touching and, I’d say, uplifting:

Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction. So eventually he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him but I found out, it is very difficult to make good mistakes.

Well, I agree that it isn’t easy to make good mistakes. Which is why I want to pay tribute to a good friend of ours, Oana. She regularly comes for walks with us along the sea or in the hills around here in the Valencian community in Spain. It’s good, however, to do other things with friends than just go on walks with them, and Danielle invited her, for a change, to join us in the joint celebration of her birthday (Danielle’s) that neatly falls on the same day as our grandson Elliott’s. He was turning three, but Danielle a little more.

The latest in our series of walks was a couple of weeks before the birthday, and Oana had been on it with us (it took us along the remains of an extraordinary Roman aqueduct cut through solid rock and, at one point, leaping a gorge on the back of a bridge – well worth the visit). As we parted company at the end of the day, Oana said, ‘see you next week, then’.

That worried me, so in the car home I asked Danielle what she thought.

‘Oana has got the date of the birthday right, hasn’t she? I mean, she said “see you next week” though it’s not till the week after.’

‘Oh, yes, she has the date,’ Danielle reassured me, ‘I sent her all the details.’

The following Saturday, we were invited to the house of another friend, Celia, for a paella. Home-made, and home-made is always the best. It was excellent.

We were chatting over a few drinks before lunch when my phone rang. It was Oana. I answered in some trepidation, fully justified as it turned out.

‘I’m at the gate,’ she told me, ‘I rang the bell and I can hear the dogs, but maybe you didn’t hear it.’

‘At our house?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Just waiting for you to let me in.’

An error had been made. One worthy of a Taniyama. But fortunately it turned out to be just as inspired as one of his. 

‘Tell her to come here,’ said Celia.

‘Oh, no, I can’t do that,’ Oana replied, when I’d passed that on to her.

‘Of course you can,’ I assured her, ‘these are great people, you’ll enjoy meeting them, they’ll enjoy meeting you, and we’ll all have a better time for your being here.’

It took a couple more exchanges to persuade her but, eventually, she let me talk her into coming over.

And it was as I’d said. She enjoyed herself and everybody else enjoyed meeting her. The food was excellent and the conversation joyful.

What more could one want?

Oana enjoying the birthday(s), with Danielle

As for the following week, Oana joined us for the joint birthday. A happy birthday following a happy mistake. Enjoyed by Elliott. Enjoyed by Danielle. Enjoyed by everyone who was there. Elliott successfully turned three. Danielle successfully turned somewhat more.

Elliott successfully turning three

So what had happened to Oana a week earlier was, in fact, the best kind of mistake. A real Taniyama. Much to everyone’s satisfaction.