A Birthday Party with Some Interesting Twists

Yesterday we had 12 7-year olds over at the house to celebrate Jonas’s 8^th birthday. With that many screaming little crazy children, we needed a whole troop to watch over them, which is why I was employed to help as well as Louisa, the old au pair who is still living in Brussels, along with Oli and Sylvie.

The kids spent the first hour having a blast simply playing on the big wooden pirate ship in the backyard and swinging on the “zeilbahn” swing. Oli hooked up a microphone to a giant guitar amplifier outside, so when too many kids were playing on the ship or someone was about to get plowed down by the zeilbahn swing, he would yell into the microphone and get everyone’s attention. Typical Oli :P

Then we ate a nice cake shaped like a big soccer field, prepared by Oli. He used gummy bears as the players (Team Bayern against Dortmund, of course both German teams and Jonas’s favorites). 

After, we played a game of musical chairs with French music, and then did spin the bottle to open the presents. This is a very German tradition for birthday parties. I think they have played spin the bottle at every birthday we have celebrated here, including Niki’s and Sylvia’s. What happens is everyone sits in a circle holding their gift. Then, the birthday person spins a bottle in the middle. Whoever it points at gives their gift to the birthday boy and he opens it. Then that person sits out and the circle gets smaller and smaller until all the gifts have been unwrapped. It’s an easy and non-biased way of opening presents. Germans…always so practical J

Musical chairs!

Spin the bottle in action :)

Me and Felix in his adorable dinosaur sun hat 

After opening gifts, I led the troop over the Place Maurice, where there is a big green field to play soccer on, as well as two basketball courts. The kids from the ghetto just down the street from us (Saint Gilles, where I live, is actually considered one of the “not so nice” communes of Brussels. But, in truth it is kind of a divided commune, one part with old, beautiful townhouses which are quit pricy (where I live) and the other part down near the metro stop where you feel like you are in a neighborhood in some outskirts of a big city in the middle east. It’s full of Moroccan men who yell inappropriate comments to young women who aren’t wearing headscarves (like me), as well as very religious women who are wearing headscarves who push around their babies in strollers while shopping in the cheap clothing stores there with goods all imported from China and India. There are also a lot of poor African immigrants who live there, and their kids are the ones who are always occupying the Place Maurice basketball court. Before the party started, Oli had declared that he was going to the Place Maurice to just check and make sure there were no ghetto kids lighting up joints own there. Of course, when we arrived later with the gaggle of 12 white, rich German kids, there was the strong smell of weed in the air and the court was full of kids. Oli wasn’t going to let this ruin his birthday party plans though. He walked down to the court, shooing the confused kids away and asking them to please let the little ones have a chance at shooting the ball. It was quite entertaining to see the ghetto kids stand on the side and watch as these little kids genuinely failed at shooting a basketball.

You can really get the idea from these pictures...

After that interesting episode, we played a game of soccer up on the field. During the game, a young boy dressed in raggedy clothes and with a few giant scars on his right arm, came up to me asking in Dutch, “Bent u al Nederlands spreken?” (Are you all speaking Dutch?) “Neh”, I replied, “Deutsch.” And then, when I heard him say something in French over to his friend, I said, “Mais je parle français aussi” (but I speak French too). He looked at me surprised. He was thinking our birthday party group was communicating in Dutch. Many French people confuse Dutch and German because they sound so similar. Anyway, he seemed relieved that I could speak French, and then quickly asked if him and his friend could join in the soccer game. I asked Sylvie and she said it was fine and they joined in. They were quite good players. One of them made a perfect goal, and it was quite nice to see all the little German kids so excited and congratulating him like old team-mates. It makes me happy to see kids from such different backgrounds playing so well together.

Felix is the ref :)

When we got back to the house, Oli did some science experiments with the kids, including one with milk, soap and dye, to show how the soap makes the dye move away, making pretty patterns in the milk.

In the end, when the parents arrived, Louisa and I had the job of handing out glasses of champagne to them. I was never at a children’s birthday party where the parents got champagne, but maybe it’s a European thing J

After everyone left, Oli got out his mini-guitar and me, Sylvie and the 3 boys all gathered on the back porch to sing along to some traditional German folk songs. I had to read the lyrics for most of them from Oli's guitar book, but I was impressed by how many the boys knew! There is this really funny one called "Aber bitte mit Sahne" (But please with cream), which is basically just a song about how every German meets at quarter past 3 on the dot every afternoon to have their Koffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) time and they always ask for cream on the cake. In the song, it lists a bunch of different specialty German cakes such as Schwarzwalder Kirch Torte and Buttercreme Torte...things that say "heart-attack" right at you..but they are delicious cakes, you must try them someday. Anyway, that was a nice way to end the day with my host family :)

Niki singing his heart out, as usual!

Next blogs coming up about Stockholm and also an adventure from this past weekend at a couple very famous markets here in Brussels!