What To Do When It Is Time For A Birthday Party

Our son just turned 8 this past Saturday and what an experience that was. We were not looking forward to his birthday because we knew we would have to throw a big birthday party since we promised him one last year and never delivered. We just don’t enjoy planning big events, at least not when we are busy with our jobs and life in general. We were hoping the excitement he had for a party last year would be forgotten and he wouldn’t bring it up. Well no such luck. About two months ago he started reminding us that he was going to have the party of the year, or at least a better party than anyone else in his class. So we decided we had to follow through this year and started to make a plan

Food

We asked ourselves what do 8 year old boys like to eat? At first we thought about the usual hotdogs and burgers, but then we decided to be a little more original. Maybe pizza? No, not much better. How about chicken fingers? No, that was too predictable. Then we thought we could be really original and get Sushi, but soon came to our senses and decided against that because even though our son loves the stuff, most of his friends probably will hate it and will hate the party too. So we ended up getting a variety of Subs from Quiznos and several flavors of pop, fruit juice.

For the cake, we took into consideration the fact that there is a gluten free craze going on right now with every second person you meet on a gluten free diet. It was easy to overcome that obstacle by going to Dairy Queen and getting an Ice Cream cake. They will write whatever you want on it and we got a bit creative with his party theme of Spiderman. The girl at Dairy Queen was quite the artist and actually drew a Spiderman figure on the cake.

Decorations

We knew we had to find some Spiderman stuff so we headed to Wal Mart but they didn’t have much, at least not at our local store. Next we tried a couple of dollar stores but it was the same story there. Since we had a couple of weeks, we thought we should look online and found a site called Party Things that had all the Spiderman decorations you could want. We ordered plates, cups, napkins, balloons, and a tablecloth from them. They also had invitations which we got in plenty of time to send out. We thought we should get all the kids a gift to remember the party, so we got Spiderman Frisbees and masks.

Activities

We knew we didn’t want to have 11 eight year olds running around the house for 4 hours, so right after we had our Subs, we took the kids to a play centre where they had those big nets full of balls where you could jump in, and they could go down slides. They also had a supervised climbing wall where the kids could climb to their hearts content and it was pretty safe because it was all made of plastic and rubber. Another section was basically a Parkour course for kids where they could run and jump and tumble without much risk of injury. The last thing we wanted was for one of our little guests to get injured. The best part of these activities was that it was all indoors, which was a must since it is still February.

Once we got the kids home, we had that great Dairy Queen cake and opened gifts. Our son got a lot of pretty good gifts like video games, gift cards and a few old fashioned toys. Everyone was gone by 5:30pm and then it was time for a massive cleanup.

In the end it wasn’t so bad and our son had a great time so it was worth it. You just need to plan ahead and be very organized almost everything will go as planned.