A Year Older and Wiser (Mom too!)

This year, I was going to be prepared. I was. I knew Kev's birthday is (relatively speaking) right after Christmas....March sounds far away...but trust me, after all the Sinterklaas / Christmas bills roll in sometime after the new year, I'm already having to think about party themes, invites, etc.........

These past months have been all about Kev's newest passion - football. Since September, he trains every Wednesday and has games every Saturday (usually 8.30 AM!) and in between he wants to play in pick up games in the field near the house, play after school at at the day care, play during recess.......you get the idea.

So, I thought - why not do a football theme party? I did some research and found a football shaped piñata (since that went over so well last year), came up with the idea for how to make football cupcakes for the class party, purchased a ''how to" plan for a football themed scavenger/activity hunt, and decided the boys coming would be old enough to handle using the chocolate fountain that has been collecting dust since we last used it at Thanksgiving  -  2010   .... I came across an idea for make your own pizza's for the lunch......We had all the elements in place around mid-Feb....handmade invites were ready to go out.

I braced myself for another birthday party. At home.

It needs to be said - what was I thinking?! 8 boys from ages 6-8..... You cannot calculate how much energy they generate (and feed off of each other) - but it's exponential. A mathematical impossibility. I was so glad I had my activities all lined up, an agenda to stick to - the plan was to keep things moving along, the fights to a minimum, and the house on it's foundation by the end of the afternoon. I can do this!

Well, maybe I could.......

Make your own pizza's went over well, but as the pizzas were going into the oven, the worst thing possible for a party centered around an outdoor football themed scavenger hunt happened...it started raining, Buckets. In true cats and dogs, let's build an ark kind of way - and it proceeded to continue to do so for the next 3 hours - and all my party planning went out the window.

We stuck to the chocolate fountain. While the (once white) dining room chairs are a little worse for the wear now, it was a hit. We had grapes, strawberries, raspberries, bananas, lady fingers and ribbed potato chips for dipping!

Next year - Not that I want to think about next year, but I think maybe 24 hours had passed before Kevin was talking about ''next year'' - I'm having the party somewhere else. Anywhere else. I'm still vacuuming up confetti from the piñata that we ended up hanging from the ceiling fan.........

Birthday Boy - Party Time!

Kev's views on Birthdays are very clear - they are fun, should be counted down to in 'sleeps' long before mom is ready to think about party's and gifts (did we not just have Christmas?!)and are a thing of joy and much discussion in the weeks leading up to the main event.

Mom's views are a little more ambivalent...I know it's not supposed to cost much to do a kids' party, but it always costs more than I think at the onset...in terms of time, money and effort. It's these times I feel like single momness (very technical word, I know) pretty much kicks my behind. It's also when the juggling act I somehow always feel between being a mom and full time employee (then throw in party planner)leaves me feeling pretty stretched.

All this is to say that somehow I got talked into doing a party this year not at a venue like the last years (Bowling, play castle, community building) but at home. My Home. For eight 5&6 year olds.

I couldn't resist Kev, who due to my schedule has the one of the least number of playdates in his class, and almost never where kids come to us - Kev always goes there. So how could I refuse when I could in effect get 8 playdates in fell swoop and earn some points with little man?

So, we agreed on a theme (spongebob) and a date (his B-Day which was on a Friday when school ends at noon) the guest list and the games.

When the big day came, I knew I couldn´t do this on my own.....I needed backup, and Richard agreed to take a half day free to be on hand to help me keep order. He was also the pinata hanger, photographer and drew the dreaded ´keep mom sane´ duty.

We had lunch, played a spongebob variant of Pin the Tail on the Donkey (involving stickers of jellyfish and trying to get them closest to spongebob´s net), twister, beat the heck out of a spongebob pinata, opened gifts,

ate Spongebob cake,

played bingo, painted sea themed sun catchers, and signed a spongebob t-shirt. It was a full afternoon!

Everyone went home happy, and Little Man had a great birthday Party

....and a great class party, and a great party at daycare.....

almost a whole week's worth of celebrations have left mom very happy that b-days come but once a year!

Birthday Boy

It's *only * been, like, a month (!) since Little Man turned 5.........

So, before I have to start planning for the next birthday, here are some photos/video of both the day itself and the long anticipated (if you're the b-day boy) party!

I know, it took me long enough..... :-)

These were on the big day, before we loaded the car for school that day (Yes, we took the balloons to school and tied them to the special chair/throne they the birthday kid gets to sit in).

For the class, we made little favor tubes with stickers, temporary tatooes, confetti, a balloon, a self inking stamp and small candies. Here is a photo of the contents and then the final package once it was all in the tubes.

I ordered the boxes for the cupcakes from ebay, and I also ordered smaller boxes for the favors at the same time from the same store.... but, what I got when I opened the package from hong kong were these little tubes and the cupcakes boxes. There wasn't time to re-order before the party, so Mom just had to make do. The end result wasn't too bad, if I'm allowed to say so?

As I already admitted in my last post, I 'cheated' on the cupcakes and ordered them rather than made them myself. Still, Kevin was happy with them! Maybe next year I'll be brave enough to make the cupcakes from scratch myself......

For the party on Saturday we did small favor bags with cupcakes, all in the theme of (of course) Cars. Everyone got a bag and a Cars balloon (or a star ballon if you one of the three girls) when they left the party. Since we had 12 kids for the party, compared to 25 plus in the class, we could have some small gifts in the bags as well.

The party on Saturday for 12 was at a bowling and event center in the next town over, Hoofddorp. They had a package for birthday parties that included birthday cake (you couldn't bring your own), drinks and then 1 1/2 hours bowling. We had three lanes - you can only have 6 kids per lane, and then I had an extra lane for the parents, which worked well - most of the parents stayed and bowled and had a good time, and I had some some support. I wouldn't advise trying to handle 12 kids in a bowling alley solo! The last hour of bowling was "disco" or cosmic bowling with blacklight and dance music. The kids all got glow in the dark necklaces to wear, and we were done entertaining by 4pm. I still think next year, Mom might scale it back to 6-8 kids, sizewise...........but I'm not thinking about next year yet! (no, really, I'm not!) :-)

As you can see from the video, Kevin got some great presents and we'll sign off with a photo of the (future) bowling phenom in action!

Party Planning 101 - Dutch Style

So, now, onto the Party Planning phase of Mission:Impossible - Birthday Edition. This was originally one really loooong post together with the countdown clock, but I decided to break into smaller posts before a reader's eyes started to bleed :-)

When it came to planning where and what the party should be this year, we based on recent experiences he really semeed to enjoy, something we could do with between 10 and 12 children, and something that, with any luck, I could enourage the parents to stick around for, becuase who really wants sole responsibility for tweleve 5 year old boys?

The fun he had with Bowling during the Christmas break meant he wanted to have a bowling party for this birthday, in the theme of everything Cars - Lightening Mc Queen, to be exact. At first, it was Spiderman (again), then it was SpongeBob (who Kev loves (from his dad) but is not so popular over here yet), and finally we settled on the ever cool, always a hit with 5-7 year old boys, Cars. it also ticked all of mom's boxes (see above) so, I figured we were good to go!

With that settled, Mom has spent the better part of two weeks searching websites both here and in the US (love Ebay for things like this!) for all things Cars. So far, I've found the favors for both the class party and the bowling party attendees, the balloons, the invites, and someone to make about 70 cupcakes for the different parties (easier to transport and share than a cake, and no fights over corner or 'small' pieces!

I'm outsourcing the cupcakes because as much as I love to bake, 70 cupcakes is beyond my capabilities during a work week. I'll package them nicely and with some creativity (I'll post pictures later) but the actual baking would just be overwhelming on top of the parties and gifts and the invites.

Class parties over here are so...creative. There are home made gifts, made to look like other things (think paper ducks whose wings are chocolate egg holders, elaborate things made out of pipe cleaners……you get the idea? Then there are the funny handcrafted bags to put everything in...maybe it is for a lower costs overall (as a Dutch pastime seems to be to compare relative cheapness of things with pride – “this, oh it took only 5 hours and 49 cents to make!), but unless there are some bulk methods to buying craft items I haven’t yet stumbled across here after 13 years, it's never as cheap as they say when you try to replicate it!!

The materials that go into crafty handmade things aren’t exactly cheap over here (there are no large craft stores, or malls or anything like that in most towns, and then you've got to figure in the time it takes to make 50-70 of anything.

There aren't enough hours in the day for this mom, I'm sorry to say. I love to be creative, but that's just too big a scale for me. Those are the moments I feel very fish out of water with the more traditional Dutch moms who work 2-3 days a week and have time for these kinds of activities. At birthday time, I'm jealous, and wish I could do more 'from scratch'. Oh well... Maybe I need a hobby room like Holly's! - I should put in a request for an attic conversion, hmmm.......

You wouldn't think 12 invites would be a big deal - I didn't, but then I got the invites and realized they were completely blank! That means a lot of handwriting, in Dutch! The Dutch part is what takes forever, then add on Kevin's wanting to 'help' by writing his name in each invite, and mom's bright idea to add confetti and a balloon to each invite, then realize I was out of stamps and needed to order/buy some (because otherwise I'm trusting one almost 5 year old to deliver something to another 4 or 5 year old, and they in turn have to get it home to mom and dad), and before I knew it, 12 invites had turned into a worthy part of a blog post.

I'm also carrying on the tradition this year of the b-day shirt. Every year, I've gotten something for everyone who comes to his parties to sign. For the first b-day, it was the autograph bear with birthday cupcake from Build-a-Bear, and each year since, I've gotten a personalized t-shirt in the theme of the party that all the kids (and parents) can sign. This way he has something fun to wear on the day once everyone has signed it, and later he'll have something to look back at as his friends change (or don't).

So, with 29 nights to go, and the invites to 12 kids and their parents out........now I have to think about what my present will be...I'm tempted to go easy this year while I still can and do the party, let 1 or 2 friends stay over, and call it good. I think between Dad, Oma and Opa's, and the friends who come to the party, he'll be more than covered gift wise, and a party for 12, plus the class party for 30 has to be paid for somehow, and it's all mom as far as planning and invested time goes..... What do you guys think - can a party be considered a gift?

Leave a comment and ease my guilt, or let me know if I'll be scarring him for life if there isn't a package in the pile with my name on it.

I'll re-visit in March with pics and party stories, promise!

B-day Countdown Clock

I think this is universal to moms everywhere, but the only way to measure time as far as Little Man is concerned is 'How many more night do I have to sleep until......?"

We used this to great effect when Oma and Vivi came to visit this last summer, but then it was with the visual help of a paper chain - we took one chain link away each night before bed, and then he could count the links left. It's amazing to me that in the 7 months or so since, his countdowns are now more or less in his head. I have to set the base line number (90, or 40 or whatever) and then he pretty much keeps track from there, and will then tell me every night after ' did you know there are only so many more nights till..........'

He gets occasionally caught up when he's been 3 or 4 nights with his dad, and hasn't done the countdown in the in-between days, so we'll have to reset the count.....but overall, he's pretty spot on, and understand the concept that the closer something is, the less nights there are till it happens. I bring this all up because the countdown we are in the middle of now is '29-more-nights-till-the big-5-and -31-till-the-party-countdown.

So, in that spirit, and since Kevin lately has taken to asking if he can see 'his pictures on mommy's computer that are for Oma' (also known as 'the blog'), here is his very own Birthday Countdown Clock:


Birthday-Countdowns