Kid Party Report

You know how those of us who are not so computery might try to solve every problem by restarting the computer, and on one hand the computery people might roll their eyes but on the other hand this OFTEN WORKS? Another one I’ve recently learned is clearing the cache. I don’t know WHY it sometimes works, but it sometimes does. I couldn’t add pictures to posts, and the link button wouldn’t work, and I kept trying to find out why, but I didn’t even know what to ASK, let alone what the answers meant (“Just insert this code between…”). But I saw a couple of people mentioning they started by clearing the cache, so I thought, “Well, I don’t see what good THAT could do, but I might as well try it”—and it fixed the problem. So! Make a note: to solve most computer problems, first try restarting, then trying clearing the cache.

In other happy news, I am now 80% done with all the 10-year-old birthday parties I will have to throw! Both parties went well, and I am ready to submit my report.

Edward’s party was first. The original plan was to take friends to an arcade, but it ended up being one friend (three other invited friends couldn’t come, or else didn’t RSVP and didn’t come). At first I had my feelings hurt on Edward’s behalf, but it turned out that just one friend was the PERFECT way to do it: they spent a lot of time together, or playing on separate machines near each other, and Paul (Paul is the one who took them to the arcade) said he thought Edward would have been overwhelmed if a bunch of friends were there. And the friend he chose was a super nice kid, AND then later we found out they’ll be in class together next year, so that was even happier.

Because the arcade is about half an hour away and the guest was from our town, we had his parents drop him at our house. We had the cake and presents at our house first, and then Paul drove the kids to the arcade and then back again; then the parents could come back and pick up the guest here. This was inspired by all the times I’ve driven a child to a party half an hour away, and then there isn’t enough time to be worth going home so I have two hours to kill in East Nowhere. I don’t resent it (it’s not like there’s a good way around it if the party place JUST IS half an hour away), but it’s so pleasant to be able to avoid it when possible.

The party itself was a big success: the two boys came up with a cooperative game-playing method that got them SO MANY TICKETS. Edward had been meh on the idea of goody bags so we didn’t do them, and I was extra glad we didn’t because both boys were able to buy SO MUCH STUFF with their tickets. You know how it’s typical to play arcade games all day and end up with 74 tickets, and then you go to the ticket counter and a Tootsie Roll is 10 tickets and the dumbest sunglasses ever are 100 tickets? Edward and his friend had, like, 6000 tickets between them and got GREAT stuff, like a flashing sword, and a lava lamp, and huge inflatable dice, and candy, and really it was a triumph all around. And THEN, there was another party group nearby that had some no-shows so they had extra goody bags, and they offered them to Edward and his friend, so that was even happier.

 

Elizabeth’s party was FAR more stressful for me, since it was an at-home outdoor party. She had a theme in mind, but it was such an unusual one I don’t even want to say it, because it’s the kind of thing where someone might genuinely accidentally find it with an online search. As a stand-in, I will say it was a woolly mammoth party. So for games, she wanted to play Pin the Tusk on the Woolly Mammoth (she drew a big woolly mammoth on a sheet of posterboard, which we tacked to the fence), and Sabertooth Sabertooth Woolly Mammoth (i.e., duck duck goose); and she wanted to have a table set up with a bunch of craft supplies so people could make woolly mammoths out of felt and/or paper and/or pompoms. We went to a craft store and pretty much bought anything brown (fur) or white (tusks, ice, snow) or blue (general coldness/ice/water). The craft supplies were one of the larger parts of our party budget.

We looked in a couple of party stores, but you will not be surprised to hear none of them had anything woolly-mammoth themed. Instead we continued to go with colors. At Target we bought paper plates and napkins and tablecloths and balloons in shades of blue (I’d thought brown and white would be more woolly-mammothy, but Elizabeth disagreed). On the day of the party, we went out and bought two dozen helium balloons in brown and white and blue—but if I were doing it again, I’d skip those. First of all, they popped, just one after another, throughout the party. Secondly, they actually didn’t look better than the non-helium ones, which I’d tied to tree branches from short strings, so that they dangled down over the party. (This worked GREAT, I thought. I highly recommend, if you have low-hanging branches like we do. It gave a sort of fairy feel to the party area of the yard.)

Seven girls came to the party. She had invited thirteen girls. As of a week before the party, we’d had five RSVPs: four yes and one no. In the days before the party, we got two more yes responses; we also assumed one yes response because the child told Elizabeth she was coming and mentioned that she’d bought the present. It is very difficult to SHOP for a party when you don’t know how many people are coming. Should we buy ONE 8-pack of party hats, or TWO? ONE 10-pack of goody-bag bags, or TWO? TWO 4-packs of sparkly rings, or THREE? It was exasperating. Really, RSVP. “RSVP” doesn’t mean “Tell me if you ARE coming,” it means, literally, “Respond [to this invitation], please.” If I ever throw another party, I’m going to write “Please let us know if you’re coming or not by [date].” What we did this time was wait until the last minute to shop, which felt frantic and unpleasant, and then I worried all the way up to the start of the party that we wouldn’t have enough goody bags. My kids were scoffing and saying, “Hey, if they didn’t RSVP, they don’t get a goody bag!,” but I didn’t agree AT ALL: it isn’t the KID’S fault the parent didn’t RSVP, and I didn’t want to punish the kid OR make it awkward for the kid. But no one unexpected came.

The party itself went fine. None of the other parents stayed or seemed tempted to; I had them put contact information on a pad of paper before they left. The craft table was popular and took up probably the entire first half-hour; I should have let it go longer, but was starting to feel as if we needed to move on to the next thing. Then they played the two games. Then someone suggested playing Murder Detective, where you sit in a circle with one person in the middle, and one person is the murderer and winks at other players who then play dead, and the person in the middle has to figure out who the murderer is. Anyway, they called it Woolly Mammoth Detective and that took up a little more time.

While they were doing that, I set up the food table. We had cupcakes, cookies, cheese puffs, potato chips, candy, and little bottles of water. The mother of the girl with a food allergy contacted me ahead of time and said she’d bring food for her to eat. The girls ate almost nothing: I was prepared for them to raze the table to the ground like a flock of locusts, but the table looked almost the same after they went through as it did before. I left it all out in case anyone wanted to come back to it later, and there were a few times when someone took a potato chip or a cookie, but we ate leftover party food for the next week or so. (The suffering! The suffering!)

Then Elizabeth opened presents, and I used the idea of having the gift-giving child sit next to the gift-opening child, and that was a great idea and I will do that for every party for the rest of my life. GREAT photos, and we DID end up having to use them a couple of times to remember who gave her what.

At that point, we had about 20 minutes to kill. So I let them suck the helium out of the balloons that hadn’t yet popped. I also let them take turns popping all the balloons I’d tied to trees, which doubled as me getting some clean-up done ahead of time. Then parents started arriving and we handed out the goody bags (cheap crap or not cheap crap, the goody bags were Elizabeth’s number-one priority so we did them) and it was over. We cleaned up, and then I had a large drink and then got into a long shower.

15 thoughts on “Kid Party Report

  1. Alyson

    For the record, you’re spot on with your computer fixes. My husband spends most of his day asking people, “have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?” And, incidentally, there’s a British show called “The IT Crowd” where that’s their motto (and it’s super funny in the early seasons, definitely worth seeing if it’s on Netflix or Hulu for Moss alone. I heart Moss!)

    Also, I really do appreciate your play by plays of things. Awesome. And I love that we have a lot of the same thoughts on things.

    Carry on!

    Reply
    1. BeckyinDuluth

      I came here to say the same thing. I work at an IT Helpdesk for a University, and if everyone here tried turning it off and then on again, or clearing their browser cache, I’d have WAY less work to do. Another common issue: check your popup blockers.

      Reply
  2. Jaime

    I too was going to say that my husband, a very computer-y tech guy, has trained me to turn the computer off and on again to see if it fixes the problem first. Hadn’t heard about the clearing the cache thing though, so you’re more advanced than I am.

    Reply
  3. Libby

    I just remembered to do the turning it off/turning it back on again with my phone, since that is also a computer-type thing.
    Glad both parties went so well!

    Reply
  4. Erin

    Thanks for the update! And I would like to present the Imaginary-but-should-exist trophy for Separate Twin Birthday Parties MVP. Give yourself a gold star — you did it! And sounds like both of your kiddos enjoyed their experiences, which (sometimes I have to remind myself) is really the main goal.

    Also, I feel for you on the unusual theme. Six weeks before her birthday, my eight-year-old announced that she wanted her party to be “bunny” themed. Never shown an interest in bunnies before. Not at Easter. I told her I had no idea how to do that, so she went on pinterest and found make-your-own bunny cupcakes, pin the tail on the bunny, and had “bunny adoptions” (pick a stuffed bunny and decorate a dollar store basket). Here’s to girls with their own minds!

    Reply
  5. Joanne

    It sounds like both parties were successful, hurrah! Also I somehow missed the tip about taking a picture with the gift giver, I am so going to do that forever!

    Reply
  6. Maggie

    I want to thank you so much for these party updates! Youngest is turning 6 in two weeks and wants an at home party and because Oldest is 12.5 it’s been quite awhile since I’ve done any kind of at home party in which I actually had to do anything other than provide food and get out of the way of the Nerf wars and/or video gaming. So many good ideas from your blog that I feel like I will be able to manage entertaining 5 six-year old girls for two hours without losing my mind.

    Reply
  7. Elizabeth

    Thanks SO much for doing an update! Sounds like your kids had great parties!

    The lack of RSVPs would drive me batty….not very considerate at all. The ‘please reply by such and such a date’ seems like the way to go; I will try to remember that.

    Reply
  8. Shawna

    I powered my iPhone off an on again just today and yes, it fixed my connection problem.

    My 7 year-old had 5 friends over to swim for his birthday a few weeks ago, and my 9 year-old had 5 friends over to swim just for the heck of it this past weekend, and I cannot get over the difference 2 years makes. When the younger set were swimming: most of the parents stayed, one kid needed a life jacket, each child that had to pee had to be briskly dried and led to the bathroom, and an adult stayed in the pool at all times. When the older set were swimming: no parents stayed, we told them the house rules for the pool and where the bathroom was, left the back door open and stayed within earshot (like, within 3 steps of the screen door), occasionally popping out to check on them and ferry out snacks.

    Reply
  9. Elisabeth

    The lack of woolly mammoth supplies reminds me of the time my five-year-old insisted on a viking party, and then refused anything How to Train Your Dragon-related because “That’s dragons, Mom, and not real vikings.”

    I’m glad to hear that the parties went well!

    Reply
  10. Ruby

    I’m so glad both parties went reasonably well! A wooly mammoth party sounds…challenging, to say the least, so it’s great that you were able to pull it off!

    Reply
  11. Tasha

    Thanks for the update. I’ve been wondering how an introvert manages parties for their children. I think you’ve been a great example. Although Im still anxious abt my own children’s parties, I’m sure to survive them.

    Reply

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