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We had the prince's 5th birthday party on Saturday, though it's a week and a half until the actual day. His birthday is always too close to Thanksgiving to make scheduling a birthday party convenient. When he turned 1, obviously he didn't care, and when he turned 2 likewise, and when he turned 3 we thought a good habit to get in was to have half- birthday parties, because his friends will almost all always be busy around his actual birthday but what a good plan to have a routine expected event around Memorial Day before they all break up for the summer every year, only by the time he was turning 3 1/2 there was a plague on and that idea was right out, and when he turned 4, likewise. But this past summer things around here were easing up to the point that outdoor gatherings were feeling okay, and he's been to a couple of birthday parties and is not at all interested in half-birthdays; he's been talking about his friends coming to his birthday party for months. So we were on the hook.
We were intending to do a thing the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but then an evite arrived for a birthday party that day for his classmate whose birthday is two days earlier than the prince's, and Himself and I said curses, we have been pipped at the post, and we hurried up and evited everyone to our neighborhood park a week earlier than that, which was two days ago.
Everyone had fun. There were two tiny bits of drama to do with a little girl who always feels big feelings insisting on being the last in line to hit the pinata and then the thing being broken by someone earlier in the line than she was, but it all turned out okay. We neglected to beg people not to bring presents, so the prince got a haul of stuff that excited him but dismayed us a bit. :-P (A couple of other parents helped me load the presents into the trunk when it started to drizzle just a bit, and when we returned from being out of sight about 90 seconds later the daughter of one of them was distraught because in that minute and a half she had happened to look for her dad and couldn't find him, and that was the last episode of tears I was aware of.) Our local grocery store does cupcake cakes, where they glue two dozen cupcakes to a board with icing and then slap enough icing over the top of them to smooth out and decorate, so we had a solar system cupcake cake and didn't have to bring forks or a knife to the park, which was a winner. (The big-feelings little girl with the pinata drama happened to get a giant crag of icing including the rings of Saturn when Himself broke off a cupcake for her, which made her even happier than she'd been upset half an hour earlier.) I have some good pictures of the prince being delighted at the sight of his cake, at his friends singing Happy Birthday to him, etc. All the other parents gave us big thumbs up. We managed to get rid of almost all of the goodie bags* (though not of enough of the cupcakes, alas).
A parenting win, all in all, but an inexplicably exhausting one.
( * scene from as we were packing up to get out of there )
We were intending to do a thing the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but then an evite arrived for a birthday party that day for his classmate whose birthday is two days earlier than the prince's, and Himself and I said curses, we have been pipped at the post, and we hurried up and evited everyone to our neighborhood park a week earlier than that, which was two days ago.
Everyone had fun. There were two tiny bits of drama to do with a little girl who always feels big feelings insisting on being the last in line to hit the pinata and then the thing being broken by someone earlier in the line than she was, but it all turned out okay. We neglected to beg people not to bring presents, so the prince got a haul of stuff that excited him but dismayed us a bit. :-P (A couple of other parents helped me load the presents into the trunk when it started to drizzle just a bit, and when we returned from being out of sight about 90 seconds later the daughter of one of them was distraught because in that minute and a half she had happened to look for her dad and couldn't find him, and that was the last episode of tears I was aware of.) Our local grocery store does cupcake cakes, where they glue two dozen cupcakes to a board with icing and then slap enough icing over the top of them to smooth out and decorate, so we had a solar system cupcake cake and didn't have to bring forks or a knife to the park, which was a winner. (The big-feelings little girl with the pinata drama happened to get a giant crag of icing including the rings of Saturn when Himself broke off a cupcake for her, which made her even happier than she'd been upset half an hour earlier.) I have some good pictures of the prince being delighted at the sight of his cake, at his friends singing Happy Birthday to him, etc. All the other parents gave us big thumbs up. We managed to get rid of almost all of the goodie bags* (though not of enough of the cupcakes, alas).
A parenting win, all in all, but an inexplicably exhausting one.
( * scene from as we were packing up to get out of there )
