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Pad Patter: 6/24 - Kids Birthdays

Angie4b1g

Angie4b1g

A hundred jobs but Bob Villa ain't one
Joined
Feb 25, 2011
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Do you have big parties?

We've never made a huge deal about them in my house. The birthday person chooses a restaurant and all 7 of us pile in and go eat there. Then home for presents and cake.

I see some of these parties other parents throw and I can hear my grandmother say "but then how will you top that next year?" in my head and then I feel less guilty about our lame birthday parties. :giggle

My daughter is having a couple friends spend the night and swim soon for her birthday (which was yesterday), and that's about the most excitement we've ever had for a birthday around here. Although, 3x 14 year old girls is far more excitement than I WANT.

I guess since I'm not a big birthday person myself, I never made a big deal about them. My poor deprived kids. :thumbsdowns
 
I never had parties as a kid, so we've kept our pretty low key. We've done about two "real" parties for each of my boys... but they were very simple things like a bowling party or gather a few friends to play laser tag and eat cheap pizza. I'm too lazy to go all out and do all the fancy decorations. I'm kind of always in awe of the people that have it together enough to create the awesome theme parties with all hand made decorations and food to match the theme.

This year we told the boys no parties since they had them last year, but we did let them pick one fun thing for us to do as a family. One of them picked laser tag and required even Mom (me) to play with them. It was surprising fun to take down little kids and teenagers! LOL. The other picked Chuck E Cheese. Gag! :)
 
My girls are still young, but at least right now, it seems crazy to put any effort into it. You put a bunch of 3-, 4-, and/or 5-year-olds in a room or a park and they will find their own fun. I bake a cake and have some water and juice available. That is about it. Decorations, favours, and whatnot just seem like a waste of money to me. If they were asking for more, then I guess I'd think about it, but I haven't gotten a single complaint yet! lol
 
I'm not a fan of birthday parties either. Because the grandparents essentially demand a party, we have a party for all the grandparents & any other aunts/uncles/cousins that want to come. Usually 3 sets of the 4 grandparent sets come (both DH & my parents are divorced). After 7 years of these, I really don't want to do them anymore. But it could be worse.

DH takes the birthday child out to breakfast & I will make them a birthday dinner - usually turns out to be pizza & cake. I try to arrange a special birthday playdate with one friend as well. Ultimately, the last 2 years we've let the kids decide: gift from mom or dad or big party. Thankfully, they've wanted a gift rather than a big party.

The only thing is . . . what will I do with the twins? We haven't done the breakfast or playdates for the twins as they've been too young to notice or care.
 
we do the dinner of choice and present from family every year. Party at age 5, 10 and 15. At 15, they have the choice for cash instead. The first one took the cash and contacts for a present! Great trade!
age 5 is an easy party, pizza, pinata and cake!
10 we have it at a chuckie cheese or pool, mini golf and they do it!
We have been to parties that are like a mini circus, and then they give us gifts and party bags to go home with that are better than the gift we bring...crazy to me?? but
I love parties, it's the birthday addition to it, that throws me! lol
 
our family birthdays are huge...we still whenever possible try to all get together to celebrate these occasions. Of course that often means lumping a bunch together since we don't all live locally to my family .... when we were in Chicago they would try to celebrate everyone's birthday that had passed since the last time we were there (which was just insane because sometimes it would be close to a year between visits). Hopefully it won't be as crazy with us living closer.

As far as kid's birthday parties, Liz has only had two. Both homegrown but themed parties. The first one was a fairy tale, knights and dragons type party and the second was Lego. Neither one cost that much money (probably < $50 each including the cake which I made and decorated both of them myself). I wish I would have been able to do more parties for her in the past, but it just wasn't always a possibility with as much as we moved. Growing up my mom threw the best birthday parties for us, nothing fancy and extremely low cost, but a blast nonetheless.
 
We love birthday parties, but we don't invite a lot of kids. My sister told me that she read that when kids are small a good rule of thumb is to invite only as many kids to total her age (counting her as one invite). So for her 5th birthday there were 5 kids plus her because one of the invites they are twins LOL!!!
My daughter loves birthday parties, instead of tea parties she throws imaginary birthday parties for all her plush toys. This year I am thinking of just taking her to a jumpy place.
 
I love birthdays & parties, but DD really hasn't had any friends (wow --- that sounds terrible! LOL!) until this summer when 2 little gurls moved in next door. DD will be 4 in August, and I think that I'm going to take her + the neighbor gurls to Chuck E Cheese, Monkey Joe's, the state fair, etc. for her 'official' party.

Since all of my family lives 2.5 hours away, what we have ended up doing for DD is that mom has a family party for her at her house with a cake and some simple decorations, and then we have my ILs over for cake on the day of DD's bday.

Now that Miss Monkey is off to preschool this fall, however, I'll see what they do for parties around here and see what happens. I would still try to avoid having a party with all of her classmates (although I hear that is the rule in some schools?!), but I would love to plan some smaller gatherings for fun themes while she is still young enough to appreciate them.

Whatever happens, I'm definitely asking Lena of Bella Gypsy Designs for party planning advice! Her kids' parties always ROCK. :thumbsups
 
We don't go nuts. Our families are now spread out enough that we don't do family parties for our parents/sisters/etc anymore with the kids. The boys will be 6 next month and they have asked for a friend birthday. We're letting them each invite 2 kids and we'll just hang out here, maybe swim at the nearby lake. Nothing nuts.

For Ella's 8th birthday this last January we did a geocaching party. We live in a state park and my hubby is the district supervisor so he knows how to hide the caches and had all the GPS thingies and all that already. I just had to make the caches, no big deal. She had 6 girls for the day and that was it.

We do take the kids out for their birthday and let them pick the place. Ella usually picks Red Lobster and last year the boys wanted Texas Roadhouse. Mostly b/c I convinced them it was necessary. Because I wanted a photo of them on the saddle together. :lmao

LeeAndra - Our school's rule for parties is no invites to school unless you invite everyone. That's the only rule. :)
 
We do low-key family birthday parties. We have done parties with friends when our kids turn 8, but they are done at home. I do a craft with the kids, dh does minute to win it games, and we have cake with their friends. I'm honestly not a fan of big parties or doing them at Chuck E. Cheese or arcades --- too much money and too much craziness.

I haven't thought to take our kids out to dinner --- we might try that. I don't know if it would work, though, since we have three birthdays in January and one in February...that might be tricky! The birthdays are so close together that I'm big on doing as much prep as I can before the craziness begins...:lol
 
we have so many in our family that just a "cousins" birthday party ends up being about 30 people (10 kids) - some years we just have a family party, but dd has gotten old enough that we let her choose if she would rather do a family party or a friend party (no more friends than her age). ds' birthday was last week and we had a great party at chick-fil-a & the kids all had a blast (and i had zero cleanup!)
 
when I was a kid we never did parties either but now that I have kids we have done one every year, but this year my youngest daughter wanted a telescope for her birthday and the price was a little steep we made a deal 2 friends over for a sleepover and then she could get the bigger present.
 
We do very low-key family birthdays. Whatever family is in town gets invited to dinner at our house (kid gets to choose what we eat and what kind of cake). And my kids, who are 6 and 9, think their day is super special. ;)
 
I never had birthday parties, so I was really excited about doing them for Katelyn. We did family parties until she was in school and then, our school has a rule that you can't invite one kid (at school) without inviting the class and since we didn't know any of the other parents, I did a skating party for her 6th birthday. That was a lot of fun and pretty easy. This year, she wanted an expensive gift (an American Girl doll), so we said she couldn't have a party...but she weaseled one out of me anyway. I'm a push over. We did a party at home and not many people ended up coming, but she had a blast! Now that I know a bunch of the moms, next year, she's just having a sleep over party instead.
 
We have always just had family parties. WE drive down to my hometown and have the party there...where all of my family is. Not the ideal way of doing it but it's the only way that seems to work for everyone else. Jason did have a friend party in kindergarten and Seth will get one in kindergarten. I think we kind of put an end to friend parties after Jason's one and only!! LOL It was way too expensive and too much work!

Jason's birthday is Friday....we are going to see Monsters University and then they have a makeup baseball game. We will have a Jason/Seth combined family party later this summer. We have really cut down!!!
 
As a kid, we had an occasionally birthday party but usually family or a slumber party with just a few kids. When my boys were little, we tried to have a little something each year but stopped around age 11ish. I still let them invite a friend over though. I love to take the birthday boy to lunch just me & him too. Fun!
 
LeeAndra said:
Now that Miss Monkey is off to preschool this fall, however, I'll see what they do for parties around here and see what happens. I would still try to avoid having a party with all of her classmates (although I hear that is the rule in some schools?!), but I would love to plan some smaller gatherings for fun themes while she is still young enough to appreciate them.
:thumbsups
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Pre-school is where everything starts!!!!

talivstouwe said:
We do take the kids out for their birthday and let them pick the place. Ella usually picks Red Lobster and last year the boys wanted Texas Roadhouse. Mostly b/c I convinced them it was necessary. Because I wanted a photo of them on the saddle together. :lmao

LeeAndra - Our school's rule for parties is no invites to school unless you invite everyone. That's the only rule. :)
Click to expand...

Our school rule is NO INVITES PERIOD! You can do it on your own but no backpack mail and NOT at school.

Tali, I have wanted to put B in that saddle for years still I haven't!
 
Both boys have always had a large party at some party venue. This past week, when my oldest turned 10, we had a sleepover with 8 total boys and we took them for almost a full day to the movies, and some other activities.

I think I prefer the big party to the sleepover because at least it's over in 2-3 hours. :stars I'm still recovering from the amount of noise from the sleepover.
 
We have pretty big parties just because my DH's family is so big, but as far as an elaborate party goes, I like to party plan so it's kind of a hobby for me. But I wouldn't feel guilty about not going crazy, either.
 
we don't do the big party thing here either. Normally its just the four of us going out for dinner at the birthday person's pick.

Its my big girl's sweet 16 in Aug this year and I have asked her if she would like a birthday party ... she said NO WAY. So it sounds like another night of just the four of us out to dinner somewhere in the city :)
 
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