This 5-year-old’s birthday party is on fire

Actual photo, actual fire, actual backyard, actual awesomeness.

GateHouse — If you are the parent of a child, birthday parties will — if they haven’t already — drive you to a degree of insanity usually only attainable by spinning around in one of those Apollo 13 G-force training machines for an hour, or by spending the afternoon beating yourself with a driveway.

But not us. No, luckily, we decided long ago that our son, who turned 5 this week — an age that he regards as being a “big boy,” although one who habitually leaves the bathroom before fully re-applying his pants  — wouldn’t benefit from the traditional annual massive birthday blowout thing.

Since he’s more popular than us, we go to our share of birthday parties. We’ve been to enough that they’re quickly becoming my Most Frequently Practiced Form Of Weekend Entertainment, replacing the things I used to do, like, I don’t know, stuff that didn’t culminate in watching a herd of bright-red youngsters feast on amounts of icing that would topple a water buffalo, were water buffaloes not extinct. (Are they extinct? I don’t even know, really. I can’t look these sorts of things up anymore, because during my usual research time I am generally at a child’s birthday party.)

Most of the time, they’re loads of fun, unless they’re at Chuck E. Cheese. Besides, they almost always result in some bizarre story, like the one we attended that featured — and there’s really no other way to say this — a camel. No, really. I fed a camel carrots for 30 minutes that afternoon, in case anyone out there thinks that the zany fun stops when you have a kid.

But a lot of the time, let’s be honest, a party’s a party, unless it’s at my house. Because, and I don’t want to sound arrogant here, but I can safely say that the single  best way to make a kid’s birthday party highly memorable is to include a man-sized brushfire passing through your backyard. Yeah. Fire. You little punks keep your PS3s or whatever. We are bringing the HEAT.

(OK, I kid, because one of the dads had connections with the fire department, and the fire trucks were there to put it out well before it spread to the hastily constructed retirement community across the fence. So, of course, no one was in any real danger. But on the plus side, the kids now think we throw the best parties in the world.)

It is one of the defining features of my luck and life that I would not notice the growing fire making its way down to our backyard until just after I sent the kids out with instructions to complete a scavenger hunt. So moments before I noticed plumes of smoke loping into the sky over the neighbor’s garage, I had dispatched 12 youngsters out to spend as much time as necessary in the back looking for Play-Doh, Slinkies and loads of what would probably be extremely flammable candy.

And I don’t know about you, but apparently when faced with the visual stimulus of something unusual and possibly fatal coming at my house and loved ones, my instinctive reaction is to stare at it like a blind, drooling puppy for a few minutes, hoping the blunt force of my sheer inactivity will push the danger away while thinking something like, “That’s a large fire. Also it’s windy. Also the fire’s coming this way.”

And this goes on for like 30 or 45 seconds before I finally switch to something like, “Wait, did I put anything important in the garage?” Only then do I realize that I have to convince 12 frosting-mouthed kindergartners that the wall of inferno making its way down the road is not the most awesome thing they’ve ever seen in their lives.

(The only one who responded was, of course, my son, who scurried inside as quickly as he could and watched the drama unfold from the safety of the couch. I would count this as a wise self-preservation instinct if he hadn’t revealed earlier in the day that he was also a little afraid of Wall-E.)

Anyway, the party’s been cleaned up, the kitchen’s been reassembled, all local fires have been extinguished, and hopefully everyone will remember a good story to tell from it. I’d expect to hear about his parties when he’s 22 instead of 5, but whatever. But I do know that there is only going to be one way we could possibly top this next year: camel.