When considering a child’s birthday party the first question I ask is whether I really need to have one. If I can find a different alternative that will still make my child happy, then I’ll do that. Some parents love to run kid’s parties. I do not. I don’t hate it either. It is just a lot of work and thankless effort. There are few things more engrumpifiying than to spend hours preparing a party, hours at top speed running the party, then to have one of the guests complain because the prizes aren’t big enough. (I would have liked to provide bigger prizes, but I was out of time and money. Since this particular child ate his weight in pizza, I’m pretty sure he got his money’s worth.) This year it was very apparent that Link needed a party. I’m not sure that Link has ever had a big birthday party. Most of his birthdays we invite a friend or two to join us for an activity of some sort. This year Link wanted an all-out Mario Party birthday. So that is what we did.
Know the children you intend to invite. I happen to know all of the boys who came to the party. Half of them are in my cubscout den. The other half will soon be. I’ve had all these boys at my house before, so I knew roughly what to expect. I also knew that most of them would be happily involved with the party I had planned. I would never plan such an elaborate scheme if I did not know the guests in advance.
Parties always begin with an awkward phase where some of the guest have arrived and some have not. It is good to have an activity that people can join in easily, but which provides some focus to the gathering. Otherwise the guests will be tempted to pull out toys and I really don’t want to be tripping over toys later. Sometimes this activity is a craft or a coloring page. For Link’s party we just provided pizza to people as they walked in the door.
The core of the party is the games. It is important to keep everyone focused on playing games together otherwise you have children wandering off to examine presents, or open presents, or get out toys. The last thing you want is children bouncing around like super balls while you’re trying to get them to play musical chairs. One of the keys is to keep the games short and focused. For Link’s party we used the Mario Party format of having a larger game broken up by mini-games. We laid out paper spaces in a trail on the floor. The kids rolled a giant die to move. Then they had to follow the instructions for their space. They were all trying to collect 15 beads by the time they reached the end of the trail. Some spaces made them lose beads. Other spaces gave them beads. Every so often a space would indicate a mini-game. The mini-games were really short. See who can blow the most bubbles. Throw three balls into a basket and get three beads. Draw pictures and see if the other kids can guess what you were drawing. That kind of thing.
If you’re going to do a big elaborate game like Mario Party, it is a good idea to play test it ahead of time. This week was insanely busy. We had no time to play test, so I adjusted the rules as we went. The required bead count dropped from 30 to 15. We ran out of Mini-games and so I declared all the mini game spaces to be +2 bead spaces. Patches took turns whenever he wanted to. Gleek took no turns at all. She was much more interested in making bead-and-pipe-cleaner art. Then halfway through the party one of the guests arrived late with his little sister in tow. Fortunately one of the other guests was unable to make it at all, so I had enough prizes. There was no way I was going to send away a little girl who had high hopes of attending a party. It was chaos. At least for me. I was constantly running, mediating, making sure that turns were taken, heading off tantrums from Gleek and Patches. Which leads to my next point.
If you’re going to run a big party, full of children, round up help. Howard was unavailable today. I knew that he would be when I planned the event. But then Kiki defected to a friend’s house because she didn’t want to be near a party full of boys. This left me alone with Link, 6 guests, Gleek, Patches, and one little sister of a guest. The fact that I was alone with all that, is my fault. There are people I could have asked to help. But I didn’t ask. It all turned out okay. I really think that all the kids had fun. None of the guests had any upsets. Gleek and Patches each had several upsets because I was unable to pay attention to them and soothe things over, but we weathered it all. But I wore myself out keeping everything going. If I’d had help the experience could have been more fun for me. And we might have gotten some pictures of the event. Link took some video and pictures with his new Vidster, but the image quality on that is pretty poor. Oh well. I didn’t have a spare thought to think about grabbing the camera.
After the games, everyone is wound up. This is when you do the presents. Some people like to do cake first, then presents, but I find that sometimes kids have trouble relinquishing ownership of the things they’ve given as gifts. It is easier to leave behind the pile of shiny things if there is a promise of treat food. Then while they eat. I stash all the presents in a corner so that they don’t cause fights later. Eating food usually calms the kids down some. That was the case with this group. We didn’t have cake, just ice cream. They ate it happily. Getting them all served was hard on me because I had to track all the requests for sprinkles or no sprinkles and glasses of water or milk.
The party can end right here. You can send the guests home. But we still had some time left, so I chose an activity that let the kids wind down a little and which required minimal effort from me. I turned on some Looney Tunes cartoons. I think for future large parties I’ll keep the time down to an hour and a half. That seems to be my limit for high-energy chaos management.
Have a quiet activity planned for after the party is over. After two hours of a dozen loud children, all I want to do is hide from children. For the rest of the day I send away all the kids who show up at my door wanting to play. If my kids want to go play at a friend’s house, that is fine, but I can’t deal with any extra kids here. We all need some quiet time after the over-stimulation of birthday party.
We’ve been lucky. Miriam has 7 cousins all within 2 years of her age and several more within 6 years of her. This means we’ve only had to deal with family. ‘Course, with 5 of the girls b-days in a two month block, we’re right in the middle of party season.
Some have done parties and pizza fun places, we like to do a crafts day. We’ve done tie dye, the last two years. This year, we’re planning on raku bead making. We also have a piñata each year. That, an older cousin who likes to tell stories and a swing set are enough for a 3 hour party. And there’s BBQ for the grown ups as well.
This year, Miriam wants to invite other friends over, which will likely be her brownie troop. Man, am not looking forward to this.
Oh yeah, what’s up with dropping off your kid at a party? Wife and I (or sometimes, just me) always stay and help out when Miriam’s attended both family and non-family parties. Can’t imagine just leaving my kid at someone else’s party.
I suspect this is a local culture thing. All the birthday parties around here are done that way. The exception being parties for guests who are under the age of 4, then it is normal for a parent or two to stick around and help their little ones.
In this case, all the boys live really close, so they all walked themselves here. When the party was over, I just sent them all home. I never even saw any of the parents today.
I loved your phrase “high-energy chaos management” — that about sums it up. I’m glad you survived and it sounds like all your hard work was worth it (for the kids who came and more importantly for your own child who will always remember this party). You’re a good mom!
I totally agree with the part about recruiting help. At McKay’s recent party, I called my sister who came and bailed me out with decorating and helping me run the whole thing. I don’t know what I would have done without her.
–Julie