WHO SAYS BIRTHDAY PARTIES AREN'T FUN? BESIDES ME.

We're kinda skeptical about letting him go because we had to keep Andrew home from daycare on Friday due to a fever and a coughing fit that has him sounding like he's strangling a duck every minute or so.

But by Saturday the fever had broken and his cough had subsided to once every three minutes.

Ah! He's getting better! Let's take him to the birthday party.

We get to the park and ... I'm not gloating here ... but there was the birthday boy and two girls from his class.

And Andrew made four.

Whereas Andrew's big birthday explosionaganza last week netted 25 kids.

I'm not saying my kid's more popular than this birthday boy.

But c'mon ... the figures speak for themselves, don't they?

My kid is a birthday party GOD!!!

...Alright ... I'm gloating.

But considering how every party we throw ends up sucking three feet of shit, let me gloat just a few more weeks.

And let me stress ... every kid in the class got an invite ... just like Andrew's party. So there, naysayers.

Anyway, we get to the party and everyone's really nice at the party ... the dad of the kid (who looks majorly depressed that his kid's party sucks so hard) is a nice guy who's pretty capable of hiding his depression over his kid's unpopularity amongst his peers.

But there's this one woman who gave trailer trash a bad name.

I was introduced to her and commited her name to my extremely short term memory bank (the "minute or less" division)and slowly gravitated to another area of the party.

At one point, I accidentally found myself in the vicinity of the trailer trash lady and ... I swear to God this is true ... she was describing her most recent sexual exploits to two other women.

The gist of it was ... she met two guys in a bar and went home and did them both.

I shit you not.

She's telling these women ... one of whom looks mildly interested while the other one ... if you did a Google Image search for "aghast", she'd be the only photo that came up.

I can only IMAGINE the type of guys she dragged home that evening because ... to put it kindly ... there's no way in hell I'd want to see this woman even remotely naked.

Let alone seeing her naked while my bucktoothed truck-driving buddy cornholed her from behind on stained sheets in a double-wide and I was on the receiving end of a hummer while concentrating more on keeping my penis from getting burned by the cigarette dangling out the other side of her mouth than the poorly planned sex act itself.

I quickly strode away from this little "girl talk" session and sidled up to Susie.

"That trailer trash woman over there," I said, gently pointing my forehead in her direction "is telling the other women about the threesome she had the other night."

Susie stood there silently stunned.

"Who talks about that at a children's birthday party?" she finally said.

"Apparently Lucinda The Syphillis Queen," I whispered.

The kids had this pinata they had to break open and Lucinda was over there cheering them on.

I kept a close eye on Andrew, making sure she didn't do a reach-around on him.

When the pinata fell to the ground and did the most unexciting pinata burst in pinata history, the kids stood there staring at it because 4 and 5 year-old American kids aren't exactly skilled in the art of Pinata Candy Retrieval.

Plus, it wasn't like there were little Reese's cups or Baby Ruths in the mix. It was all this generic hard candy that wasn't wrapped properly or something. To me, it looked like a bag of rocks had been busted open. Hence the kids' confusion.

Anyway ... Lucinda falls to her hands and knees to help the kids sort through the grass to gather up goodies.

"I bet that position comes naturally," Susie murmured in my ears.

SCORE ONE FOR THE MISSUS!!

So once all the candy's divvied up (which didn't take long ... did I mention there were only four kids there?) the kids come sit down at the picnic table for cupcakes and ice cream.

Andrew sits right across from the birthday boy.

The birthday boy ... he isn't looking too great. This is my first good look at the kid because I've found that it's not too cool for a grown man to intently stare at a young boy in public these days.

This kid looks like death warmed over.

"Your boy doesn't look too good," I say to the kid's mom.

"Oh, that's not my boy," she says. "I'm not his mama. I'm just his daddy's friend."

Now I'm totally confused.

Because I coulda sworn she said she was his mama when we were introduced.

Maybe she said "I'm fuckin' the kid's daddy" and I misinterpreted that to mean she was the kid's mom or something.

I dunno.

So she mentions the fact that the birthday boy is a pale green in color and the Dad says "Yeah. He's got that stuff that's goin' 'round now."

Oh.

You mean THE BIRD FLU, YOU IGNORANT FUCKER?!?

Meanwhile, Birthday Boy is coughing up loogies the size of Buicks and spewing his infected spittle in Andrew's direction and all over his cupcake.

The kid's eyes are crossed and threatening to roll back in his head as sweat drips off his face. While I didn't touch it (society frowns on grown men touching little boys' faces in public ... goddamned society), you probably could have fried an egg on the kid's forehead.

I try my best to convince Andrew that he doesn't want his cupcake which is now soaked in disease.

Andrew tries his best to convince me that he, in fact, does want to partake in the cupcake.

I wrestle with the etiquette factor of whether I should ask for another cupcake since Andrew's is now dripping with the birthday boy's mucus.

Finally, I just decided to ask.

After all, we're at a party where the kid's aunt is discussing how to suck a complete stranger's dick while getting jackhammered in the ass by another so asking for another cupcake shouldn't be met with appalled looks of disgust.

I was graciously handed another fresh cupcake and put it on a clean paper plate and placed that in front of Andrew.

"Eat this one," I said, as I removed the other phlegm-coated plate and cupcake from in front of him and dumped it in the nearest metal trash can.

Not the smartest thing you've done all year, Daddy.

Andrew didn't WANT this new cupcake.

He wanted his OLD cupcake.

And he let me know this by SCREAMING like Drew Barrymore at the beginning of "Scream".

It didn't take long for me to snatch Andrew up in my arms, thank the kid's Dad for inviting us to this fun-filled party and ushering my family out of that park as quickly as possible.

Yesterday, Andrew woke up.

...Coughing and gagging and sweaty and crying and burning up with fever.

So today I'm staying home with the kid and we're going to watch "Little Einsteins" over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Thank you Birthday Boy!

Thanks for the gift of fever-induced hysteria!