I'm back in the writing game with this brand new, highly informative article on why you MUST take your children to birthday parties. ALL of them.
Here's an excerpt below, but if you want to read the full article, go to: THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC
Parents, take your kids to all those birthday parties - here's why
Once upon a time, a million years ago, in a San Fernando Valley far, far away, my mother had a birthday party and nobody showed. Not a single kid.
That is why one of her last wishes when she died two months ago was not to have a funeral.
Here she was, in the “comfort care” wing of UCSF, licking her final See’s chocolate lollipop as I held it to her mouth, and she was fundamentally still that little girl, sitting at her dining room table, chubby hands resting on an old lace table cloth, wearing her wilting paper party hat, staring at a door that never opened.
Parents, its very simple: When it comes to kid parties, always go.
Sunrise, sunset, ashes to ashes, funk to funky, they didn’t show up at my birthday party and now I won’t give them the chance to blow off my funeral. I held up the sucker to give my mom another lick before depositing it facedown in a Styrofoam cup of tepid water on her bedside tray. I hoped for a good song on the “soft rock” cable music channel playing on the TV in her hospital room.