Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/18/strangers-celebrate-birthday-o.html
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People mostly suck but are sometimes wonderful too.
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…it’s just these onions that I’m chopping, is all.
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“The beautiful smile on her face when her cake came out made it all worth while,” said PJ.
I’ll bet. Look at that cake!
Happy birthday, Remi! Hope you’ve made some new friends.
Dust here. Jeez.
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Dealing with the fallout when plans don’t work out is one of the toughest parts of parenting a kid on the spectrum. So it’s wonderful to hear a story like this.
…and I’m man enough to own up to crying.
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I can imagine. It’s already scary being the parent of a neurotypical kid.
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Yeah, I’ve never really wanted children. My childhood was not always the most pleasant (my family was great) mostly other children were awful. I’ve put up with a lot of shit (I’m sure others have had worse) from being teased about my name, my mother’s weight, to my physical features… whatever. Fine but if I had a child and anyone wanted to hurt them or their feelings or just did it inadvertently, honestly don’t know how I could handle it.
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Stop trying to make me cry, internet, because you’re succeeding.
Ah right, that’s what it is. It’s the onions you’re chopping that’s making me cry.
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I blame the parents of the kids that didn’t show here
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I hope the tone of this topic will continue to stay positive, but yeah, it’s a dick move not to RSVP for your child’s attendance at a 5-year-old’s birthday party. Autistic or neurotypical, little kids take these things really seriously. I’m glad so many adult members of Remi’s local community still understand that.
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Agreed that blame won’t help make anything better, and I’m glad the story had a genuinely happy ending, but I have to wonder how and why so many of the 10 originally invited guests just didn’t bother to show up.
According to the article, 2 of the children had to cancel at the last minute, meaning that 6 of their invitees were simply ‘no call, no show.’
O_O
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Which doesn’t reflect so badly on the kids as it does the parents, who damned well ought to know better; it shows a total lack of respect, which, I’m afraid, is likely to be inherited by the offspring.
Sad, very, very sad.
And I really ought to do the dusting around here more thoroughly…
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Agreed… though I wasn’t implying the children themselves had any agency in this scenario, whatsoever; as we are talking about five-year-olds.
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That got to me too. I’ve got my contacts in today, so the moisture (and beautiful slice-of-life) is very welcome.
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The parents still ought to have reported as early as they knew; but I’d be inclined to cut them some more slack depending on why their children weren’t attending.
Being outnumbered at your own party by ‘friends’ who don’t much like it or you and don’t want to be there would be an experience that makes just eating cake alone feel like triumphant euphoria by comparison. And you can shove a kid that age into going; but probably not into maintaining party manners.
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You gotta start sometime.
Autistic kids are already beaten (sometimes literally) into meeting the neurotypical world 98% of the way. The veryveryvery least we can do is teach our neurotypical children not to be complete assholes to other kids just because they’re a bit different.
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Nice ending. Damn, that had to be difficult to expect as a parent. So cool people showed empathy and created a memorable moment for the girl and her parents.
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But… but… I thought autistic people were the ones who lacked empathy!
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I’m glad it turned out well, but this hit close to home. My parenting experience has been more or less exactly like this, including a party (for a kid who, we later found out, is actually autistic!) that went this way minus the heartwarming call to arms on Facebook. Over and over and over, we’d make plans, then get failures to RSVP, or RSVPs that cancel or no-show on the day-of.
It really burned us on trying to “be social” with other families and I’m sure it had a negative impact on our kids. Our takeaway is that either we’re terrible to be around and people are trying to seem polite by initially feigning interest, or everybody is monstrously “flaky” and doesn’t even have the courtesy to feel bad about it afterwards.
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I think the Bookface is making people flakier and flakier, this one story notwithstanding. It’s making us superficially friendly to people we couldn’t give a shit about, and we even consider them our “friends” (as in, one friend out of 3300) on the Bookface. Plus, it’s super easy now to RSVP “yes” to something you have no interest in ever attending. No need anymore to hole up in your house only associating with the people you want to associate with, and only RSVPing via snail mail.
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