Two and a half hours in a church hall on a Saturday afternoon. Thirty yellow balloons hovering just above the ground. Twenty-eight second grade girls. Eight large pizzas. Seven two-liter bottles of soda. A huge vegetable tray. One full sheet cake. One karaoke machine. Three microphones. And, the soundtrack to High School Musical 2 playing…over and over and over again.

I did a lot of counting today – and not just the numbers of balloons or bottles of soda at my daughter’s 8th birthday party. I counted all the birthday parties I’ve hosted for my four children since I became a mother. The sum total took me aback: last weekend’s birthday celebration was party number thirty-two. 32!

I searched my mind to recall their themes.

There were at-home parties featuring unicorns, Star Wars characters, pirates (twice), firefighters, Harry Potter, kittens, astronauts, butterflies, Dora the Explorer, horses, Legos, marine life, and Rescue Heroes.

My sons have celebrated their birthdays at bowling alleys, at a minor league baseball game, and at laser tag facilities. One of my daughters had a wonderfully messy and creative party at our community center’s pottery studio. We’ve had a luau, ballet parties, and a big backyard rainforest party with sprinklers and plastic wading pools.

We’ve had store-bought sheet cakes and ornate home-made ones. (You should have seen the pirate ship I made, complete with root beer barrels, malted milk ball cannonballs, and little plastic pirates climbing the wooden dowel masts.) I’ve scoured the Internet for the right spun sugar toppers for cupcakes. I’ve made treasure hunts and modified “Simon Says” in countless ways to fit the day’s theme.

Can you tell? I love it!

Gary Chapman is the author of the “Love Languages” series of books. He states that there are five primary ways that people “speak and understand emotional love.” These are: “physical touch, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and words of affirmation.” Chapman writes that everyone communicates love in one of these ways.

Maybe he could add a sixth one: “giving birthday parties!”

With a busy family life, for me creating my kids’ birthday parties every year is a tangible way to show each of them that I appreciate them as individuals. The child whose birthday is approaching is singled out. We pore over birthday party websites and circle ideas we like in catalogs. We discuss guest lists at length. At those times, I often learn new things about my child’s current batch of classmates and the specific reasons why my child most values each friend. We bake, address invitations, and assemble goody bags together. We decorate for the party – often creating homemade decorations to supplement whatever we’ve bought.

I know parents who make other choices – parents, perhaps, whose love language isn’t “giving birthday parties.” I have friends who allow their children a party every second or third year. They have dinner at a favorite restaurant or go on a special outing to celebrate on the “off” years. Some children don’t enjoy big parties, so instead they invite one or two friends over to watch a movie or spend the night. I admire parents who limit the number of guests their children can invite to the age that child is turning on her next birthday. All of these are sensible ideas and ones I can recommend whole-heartedly.

But…I have to admit – I don’t follow them myself.

The parties I give my children aren’t lavish. For my daughter’s recent High School Musical party, the karaoke machine and microphones were borrowed from a friend. The pizzas were inexpensive and the cake was $15 from a warehouse club. The girls spent most of the party dancing around the room. There was no magician and no pony rides. It was just a very large group of girls dancing and singing.

The most excessive choice I’ve made because of my “birthday party language of love” happened a few years ago. My younger son was turning eight and had just finished a difficult school year. Among other things, a new boy was bullying him and a few of his friends. My son and his friends struggled for months to try to figure out what to do about the problem, not wanting to be “tattle-tales.”

Finally my son told his teacher about the bullying. The school acted swiftly to end the bad situation. The principal met with my son and the boy in question. The principal then met with my son’s whole class to talk about the importance of telling adults when you are being hurt. All the attention - even though it ultimately solved the problem - embarrassed my son. His birthday was the day after school ended for the year.

The day before the party, I surveyed our plans. I was glad to see that all of his friends could attend. We had materials to transform the backyard swing set into a pirate ship. All the boys would receive eye patches and bandanas. The aforementioned pirate ship cake looked magnificent.

But, I thought to myself, how can I make this even better? On a whim, I drove to our local appliance rental shop. There were large, blow-up “moon jumps” for rent, but these were too expensive and weren’t theme-appropriate. I walked past hefty power tools and gardening instruments, but couldn’t find inspiration.

But, then, I saw it: a cotton candy machine! For about $100, it could be mine the next afternoon and I could have all the blue candy sugar I wanted.

The back yard was a delightful sight the day of the party. There were about 20 young pirates wearing eye patches, gold hoop earrings, and drawn-on scars. They pantomimed sword fights with their inflatable swords. They swung off the sides of the huge pirate ship and held sticky cones of cotton candy. My son was beaming. It was great to see him smiling again.

So, I’ve been a Mom for 11 years and, so far, have hosted 32 birthday parties for my children. Next month will be party number 33. My soon-to-be six year old is already drawing up her guest list.

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A friend calls me on the phone and tells me about a story she’s just heard on the news. “It turns out,” she says rather pointedly, “that multitasking is counter-productive. You have to do one thing at a time in order to do it well.”

While she summarizes the latest findings on the topic, I make four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I fill the dog’s bowl with food. I delete some junk email from my in-box. I unload the dishwasher. I retrieve my children’s hats and gloves from the clothes dryer and lay them out with their coats near the back door. I motion to my son that it’s time to practice the guitar.

“Multitasking makes you do inferior work, stresses you out, and makes you feel like your life is rushing by,” she says. “You probably get less done.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I say, nearly dropping the phone as I zip my youngest child into her puffy, pink snowsuit.

What I don’t say is, that although the idea of only doing one thing at a time is very appealing to me, I can’t begin to imagine what havoc that would wreak in my life right now. Doing just one thing at a time? What?

My friend has one 11 year-old daughter; I have four children. My girls are five and seven; my boys are 9 and 11.

Her daughter dresses in a crisp, plaid school uniform every morning before going off to private school. Mine attend the public school down the street. The only uniforms they wear are of their own creation.

My eldest wears straight-leg jeans and shirts with his favorite baseball players’ names on the back.

My second child inexplicably told me three years ago, when in first grade, that his “signature color” was orange. He wears orange t-shirts and carpenter jeans to school almost every day. (This makes shopping for his school clothes very simple – orange t-shirts in short and long sleeves.)

My second grade daughter talks about her own, personal “fash” (short-hand for “fashion”) and wears clothes that – inexplicably – seem to be making just the right statement. Occasionally, she notes that her outfit looks like something Mary-Kate and Ashley wore in one of their movies. As I’m not a connoisseur of the Olsen twins’ movies – and because Mary-Kate and Ashley have such a vast body of work – I can’t always predict what my daughter will find acceptable.

My kindergartener still dutifully wears whatever I lay out for her the night before – mostly hand-me-downs from her fashionable sister. After school, between making hot chocolate and setting out tangerines and cookies for snacks, I look over my middle school son’s pre-algebra, remind my fourth grader how to make a capital “L” in cursive, help my second grade daughter use the word “stretch” in a sentence, and keep track of the color pattern – black rectangles and blue circles - my kindergartener is doing for homework.

And I answer the phone, begin to make dinner, try to remember when we last “misted” the gecko, and I let the dog in and out of the back door.

I know my friend has only good intentions when she mentions this news story to me.

Most days multitasking is a way of life for me. Having too many balls in the air sometimes makes me feel like they will all crash down in a big jumble around me. I do indeed get absent-minded – just as researchers warn we multitaskers will – and I forget little details that my brain deems inconsequential. Which neighbors got a hamster for Christmas? What kind of countertop did they put in across the street? Which socks did my daughter say are too itchy to wear? But, so far at least, nothing important has been forgotten. Nothing at least that I can remember.

There are seasons in parenting. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine that my children would be able to pour themselves a bowl of cereal or take showers or walk home from school on their own. In this current season I still need to help with homework, with brushing their hair and making sure their teeth are clean, finding a missing library book, negotiating the details of a hard day, and with getting them where they need to go.

And, as I am one person and they are four, this involves some significant multitasking.

I do make an effort to resist our culture’s call to do-everything-at-once. As much as I need to think about several things at once to keep the household together, I do manage to build several “one thing at a time” parts into my day.

Here are a few: we eat dinner together every evening, without television. Phone calls, mostly, go unanswered during our evenings together. I read books – or at least one book - to my five year-old every day. I talk with each of them about the events of their day. I usually know which friends sat next to them at lunch, what the best and worst parts of their days were, and what most interests them at school.

Sometimes – surprisingly– I do find that the day has opened up and I am truly doing one thing at a time. These are restorative moments. I vacuum a room or read a magazine or make a long phone call and catch up with a friend.

But then the back door opens and everyone rushes in. And I couldn’t be happier to see them.

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