After a New Year’s Eve party, around 2am, I woke up with a nasty headache. My throat was dry and it hurt so bad I couldn’t swallow – from sleeping with mouth gaping open. My drool had evaporated hours ago. I was still wearing all my clothes, and I was on the floor. I’d lost all feeling in my left arm because it was pinned beneath me. Mustering my strength, I used my good arm to push against the floor, and slowly, I rose into a slumped sitting position. Then I waited while the blood flowed back into my dysfunctional appendage, breathing heavy, trying to make sense of it all.

“The party’s over,” I thought.

I had passed out sometime before the clock struck twelve. I’d missed the countdown to midnight. I’d missed the shouting and the whooping and the popping of the corks. I’d missed the kissing of the wife, the toasting of the toasts, and the watching of the Dick Clark Ryan Seacrest.

As my mind reluctantly churned into action, I realized that I had passed out sometime before the clock struck twelve. I’d missed the countdown to midnight. I’d missed the shouting and the whooping and the popping of the corks. I’d missed the kissing of the wife, the toasting of the toasts, and the watching of the Dick Clark Ryan Seacrest. And since January 1st is my birthday, I’d missed the saying of the “Hey, it’s your birthday! Happy birthday!”

 And thus, I entered into the year 2011. Not with a BANG! but with a Holy crap, will I ever regain the use my left arm?

Now, I’ve passed out after my fair share of New Year’s Eve parties, but seldom, if ever, have I conked out before midnight. And I’ve usually been able to end up on a bed or a couch or a dining room table – anything softer that the floor I found myself upon that faithful night. So what happened to me? How’d I get there?

Adding to the weirdness was the total lack of evidence that I’d been drinking alcohol. In fact, the last beverage I remember consuming was a Diet Dr. Pepper. As I slumped there, I looked around and got acclimated to my surroundings. I was in my brother-in-law’s spare bedroom, an open suitcase right next to me. My daughter’s backpack was there, too, her toys strewn about. I wrenched around, and there she was behind me, sound asleep on a mattress, snoring a little. I looked around to my left and there was my wife, holding our son, both of them passed out on a futon. I stood up and began to stumble around, finding a glass of water and my pajamas and a little leftover room on the futon.

 

"Zzzzzz."

We’d been visiting my wife’s brother’s family for New Year’s. All day long before the party, my son had gotten sicker and sicker, his eyes constantly accumulating gross yellow gunk, his nose constantly accumulating gross green gunk, his mood growing increasingly surly. He’d caught a cold from his sister. During the party that night, my wife and I had spent a good hour and a half tag-teaming him, trying to sooth and rock him to sleep as he screamed and squirmed and rubbed the aforementioned gunk all over us.

Around 11:30pm, we all fell asleep (in my case, on the floor to avoid disturbing our sweet little screeching gunk-factory). I woke up with a headache because I’d gotten sick, too. And so had my wife. We were all sick. And tired. And no one had gotten a drop of champagne.

Luckily, the next morning, my brother-in-law made blueberry pancakes. And bacon. And sausage. And coffee. God bless that man. And God bless pancakes. I didn’t even care that pretty much no one had remembered that it was my birthday.

So. Is this what life with two children is really like? Is this what all you twenty-somethings have to look forward to? Does growing up and having a full-on family mean you trade drunken hoopla for snotty noses and screaming kids and throbbing headaches you can’t nurse away by sleeping in the next day and eating cheap tacos?

Yeah, it kind of does.

But having a full-on family also means that, at breakfast the next day, as everyone’s bustling around taking care of babies and frying bacon and cleaning up spills and getting dressed and keeping your sick, gunk-caked son off the damn stairs for the 100th time ... your four-year-old daughter suddenly whips around in her chair with a giant grin on her face, and, unheard by anyone else, she whispers to you, “Daddy it’s your birthday! Aren’t you happy?”

And somehow, yeah. You’re totally happy.