A Dragon's Birthday

It was Tisha's birthday today.

Tisha, for those who don't know, is our family dragon.

She's black and white, she lives on our roof, is mostly friendly, and coincidentally she's eight today.

I did not know this, and nor did Marie, until our four year old reminded us. It seemed a little suspect as he reminded us immediately after being told he couldn't have cake today, but he seemed so passionately adamant that we shouldn't deny Tisha her birthright of yearly cake indulgence, so we agreed we'd make her a cake.

Apparently she likes eating blueberry cake. And people.

With 11mo in arm, Marie pulled the flour, eggs, sugar and scales out and got to work, with the 4yo and 2yo 'helping' hard, in the way that only toddlers can.

It looked like someone had put a grenade in a box of icing sugar and then taken a baseball bat to the rest of the dining room for good measure, but sure enough, fifty minutes - and an inexplicable number of used kitchen utensils - later, there emerged a fully formed cake, complete with icing and the prerequisite blueberries.

We shoved eight ceremonial candles on, we sang loudly, and Tisha blew the candles out with a little help from Daddy.

It was glorious.

We've started saying yes to basically everything.

If the kids have a ridiculous idea that sounds like hassle, but kind of fun, we pull our fingers out and go 'sod it let's go', by which point it becomes almost competitive as to which parent can commit to the game as hard as possible.

While initially it feels like a lot of work, and you just know there's going to be a mountain of clearing up to do afterwards, it has a few surprising benefits:

• We don't have to come up with any ideas yourself about what to do next, you just follow instructions, even if they involve trying to fly or putting yet another 'experiment' in the freezer to be forgotten about
• The clearing up is usually only about 10-15% more than we'd be doing anyway, such is the baseline level of chaos in our family, so it works out pretty good value
• It encourages the kids to come up with their own ideas, and it also shows them that their ideas are worth listening to

I think a lot of the time we lose our wacky wonderful imaginations as we grow up because other people, particularly adults, give us the sense that the ideas we come up with aren't worth paying all that much attention to, other than with a cursory 'that's nice honey', before returning to our apparently much more interesting 'adult' conversation of sensible things like the economy and Love Island.

I can imagine if you spend all day conjuring up all sorts of fantastical stories and in-depth plot lines to your imaginary play, only to find that your hard work is dusted away with a single generic sentence of approval, the reward-to-effort balance is going to fade fairly quickly.

But what if you came up with an idea, presented it to an adult and they exploded with enthusiasm, "That's the most amazing idea you've had today, let's do it!" Imagine how enthused you'd be to see someone enjoying and celebrating your creatitivity as much as you. Imagine how much harder you're going to try and create things and come up with ideas if you can see immediately that they're deemed worthwhile by the people you respect and love more than anything else in the world.

I can tell you - they lit up - like you wouldn't believe. They started giggling and jumping and their pupils dilated like they'd just taken a hit of something exceedingly illegal. It was magical.

So from now on, if it's not illegal or potentially life-alteringly dangerous, we're going to try and say yes.

Just for the fun of it.

We also made sure to note that Tisha's birthday is the 13th March, so they don't try and pull that shit again next month.