Today we celebrated my son’s tenth birthday.

I wanted to make sure he got a party this year because ten is a big milestone. I also wanted to make sure we did something with friends for his birthday because last year we couldn’t, due to the stay-at-home orders we were under at the time.

We rented a picnic spot at a park with a splash pad and he and his friends played together for a couple of hours. It was nice to have that time for him to spend around his friends since we have had to take such care over the past year to stay away from the people we love to reduce our chances of getting sick.

That being said, I was a wreck from about a week before the party started all the way up until the guests arrived.

I had not planned a single birthday party or get-together in a whole year, aside from the drive-by party we did for my five-year-old at the beginning of the year. There were so many things I had to remember to purchase or to bring, there was a guest list I had to keep track of, and there was the possibility that the splash pad would not be working on the day of the party, as it was broken the day I went to pay for our rental spot and I took it on faith and the word of the receptionist that it would be fixed in time for my son’s birthday.

Not to mention I recently started a new medication in which one of the side effects is increased anxiety. I was not sure how much of the anxiety was my own, and how much could be contributed to the medication.

A few days before the party, smoke from a fire in a neighboring county began to settle into the valley where we live and I worried that it would last through the weekend. Smoke and ash-filled sky are not any conditions you want the weather to be in when you’re inviting children to play outdoors for two hours. I worried that no one would want to show up if we chose to have the party and briefly considered canceling it.

But the smoke cleared, the food was purchased, and the only thing I ended up forgetting were towels, which are probably among the least important on a list of things I could have possibly forgotten to bring with us. Most of the people that had been invited showed up. The kids had a fun time running around, playing in the water, and just being children. There were sandwiches, snacks, and cake.

My grandma used to say “hope for the best and expect the worst. We usually end up landing somewhere in the middle, and that is just fine.