At some point in time, every parent wonders how they should approach birthdays. As a family, for the last 4 birthdays in a row, we have paid very close attention to the boys’ birthdays. I’ve thrown a Old MacDonald Party, Basketball Party, Dump Truck Party and a Train Party.
For AJ’s 2nd birthday party however, we just invited the family over for some hotdogs and potato salad. My mom let us use leftover cake from Easter, and we picked up a chocolate cupcake at a bakery for AJ. In total, we had only 5 or 6 presents tops.
No guests. No decorations. No games. No fancy cake.
And you know what? It was just as much fun! For me, it was probably even MORE fun. Sure, we did a little bit of extra cleaning throughout the day, paying special attention to a good deep cleaning of the deck, but we were probably going to do that anyways. Because I wasn’t stressed out about guests and decorations, I was able to relax and enjoy myself! I didn’t realize that a small part of me was dreading birthdays because of all the “work” involved.
And our 2 year old loved all the attention during his birthday song. He was so hilarious while he ate his cupcake that he actually had quite a large audience gathered around him for the better part of an hour. Get this– he divided the cupcake in half, right down the center, and didn’t touch the other half (not even the frosting!) until he was finished with the first half. We even tried to rotate the cupcake when he wasn’t looking, but he just reached his hand over and continued to eat from the opposite side. See what I mean about how he marches to the beat of his own drummer?
The entire time we sang, he gave us coy smiles.
Once we blew out the candles, the drama began. We attempted to take the candles out, but he screamed, “NONONO!” as loud as he could muster.
Finally, he tasted a little bit of frosting and calmed down 🙂 See if you can spot Gregory’s “gollum-face” in this next picture as he eyes AJ’s chocolate cake.
What about you? Do you host parties every year for your kids?