Posted in Sisterly Advice
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We've never been a family to do birthday parties. First off, our house in town was just plain too small. When you have 8 children of your own, where are you going to put a whole bunch of extras? LOL And then there's the whole question of whether I agree with drop-your-kids-off-parties in general. So, we never did them.
But when we moved to the country, my husband mentioned something just in passing about having the room for birthday parties now, and it set my mind in motion - - always a dangerous thing. :)
I've often thought I could do one of those businesses where you plan out children's birthday parties, go into the client's home, put the party on, clean up, and leave. I love planning and I love being creative. So I really wasn't afraid of the idea of doing one for my own children. That was before I did one!
The first birthday to come up after the move was Juli's 7th birthday. I planned out a fairy princess party, invited 7 little girls and their families, planned food, a fairy doll cake, cupcakes shaped like little flowers for the girls to decorate, crafts and games, decorated the yard with gauzy tents and a lacy tablecloth on the food table and lots of flowers, and made little flower crowns for each little girl and decorated invitation cards for each. Then we cleaned the house top to bottom, set everything out on the day of the party, organized the chaos of the party itself, and cleaned everything up when we were done. Whew! Talk about insanity! Fun, sure! but totally insane! We were very glad to be done.
Only, we weren't done of course. We had seven other children! Fortunately, the boys weren't really into the idea of a theme party, and two of the little girls were too little to care, but that still left two more little girls. Even harder was that both of their birthdays were in the dead of winter which meant an indoor party and definitely not enough room for that many little girls and their families. (Keeping in mind that nearly every family we are friends with have at least 6 children!)
So I gave up the idea of insisting on whole families and tried to do things as simply as possible. Um, sure.
The next birthday was Lissa's ninth. We decided on a Little House theme and we invited just three little girls, two of which were able to make it. We did it on a weekday afternoon and planned just cake and icecream.
The girls churned the icecream, worked on little nine patch quilt square sewing projects, and did a little square dancing while I played the fiddle. It was still a bit crazy preparing for the party and sewing up six Little House bonnets the day before, but the party itself was a lot more low key.
Finally Abi's 5th birthday was coming up, and much as I would have liked to get out of doing a party altogether, she would have none of that! She invited everyone she saw months in advance, including my midwife, to her birthday party. She talked about what she wanted to have to eat and what her cake would look like! So I started thinking as simple as possible. :)
I ended up having the neighbor girl, Emily come over and help me out. We had just had Emily's two little sisters come as well as my sister's little girls. Emily helped me to do each little girl's hair, and then when they were each fancied up, we had a teaparty. My boys made most of the cupcakes, cookies, and candies, and we had juice "tea".
It went off without a hitch, no stress, and Abi had a blast. Not that I'd want to do it everyday.
I'm hoping that now that each of the three older girls have had one party, I'm done for a very long time, maybe even forever! It was fun, and given the chance to do it over, I probably would have done the same thing again. God is good and His plans are perfect. But I sure didn't have any idea what I was getting into when I started. :) |
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