I’ll never forget the night Nate was born. Yes, there was the part where he was born so fast James was still wearing his backpack… but I’m thinking more about how he was supposed to be a February baby. He was perfectly comfortable and five days late and as the clock struck midnight and the date rolled-over to March first, I remember thinking to myself, “Oh no! This can’t be happening. Now he won’t have his own birth month. He’ll have to share March with Jakey. Poor Baby Cillo…”
Honestly, it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
Having two little boys, both born in March, just two years minus two weeks apart, has resulted in exactly one birthday party extravaganza per year. Planning one party is a dream come true. One invite. One food order. One theme. Sometimes two cakes. But otherwise economical, environmentally friendly, mentally friendly. And these are the years where if you’re not careful, you can spend every weekend tromping from one screaming pizza party to the next.
It’s been over seven years since we hosted our last home birthday party. Very, very early on I realized there is a certain brilliance to holding your party at a venue that is not your home. No cleaning-up beforehand. Kids show-up. Run around like crazies. Eat lunch. Eat cake. Make an insane mess. Two hours go by. Grab your kids. Settle the check. Leave the chaos behind for teenagers stuck working weekend birthday parties. We’re outta here!
Like I said… brilliant.
Over the years, we held our first party in our backyard. One-year-old parties are for grown-ups so our camping themed barbecue for Jacob’s first birthday was simple, and super cute and only involved one crying kid. The following year we somehow pulled-off a monkey party for our two-year-old big baby monkey and his 15-day-old baby monkey brother. That was our last at home youngster soiree.
For Nate’s first birthday, there was the joint cowboy party at Granddad’s with real ponies and little neighbor girl pony managers. It helps when your granddad has an actual log cabin. We followed that year with 2 & 4 at Happy Hollow. Perfectly timed so as not to outgrow the darlingness that is the treasure of Happy Hollow and the Fruit Crate Express. We hit AVAC for our 3 & 5 indoor swimming party which was slightly stressful given the water part, but at that time Jacob was mostly grumpy unless immersed in chlorinated water. The big 4 & 6 were celebrated on ice skates at Sharks Ice. I remember a lot of buckets and wrestling on the floor with giant blades strapped to their feet. And we topped-off our final year in birthday party venue heaven at Bass Pro Shop for 5 & 7. It included bowling in an underwater fish bowl and watching the trout feeding. The best part of Bass Pro Shop is really all the free vehicles you can “drive.”
Last year we moved to San Luis and found out there are no businesses dedicated to kid birthday parties. Well, except for the two town gymnastics joints. Our Pokémon Parkour party crushed it. Primarily because of the young dude that could run up walls and do flips and made gymnastics look super fun for boys. When you’re 6 & 8, you can market gymnastics as exercise for ninja warriors. Little boys eat it right up. They totally don’t associate it with pink leotards.
Today we’re recovering from our first actual party in the barn. We marked 7 & 9 with an all-out Minecraft theme of course. The Purnell family was quite fashionable traversing downtown today in their designer Minecraft eyewear.
Over the course of the party it rained off and on creating the perfect trifecta of sugar-crazed + Nerf gun wielding + muckfest-enabled bilingual banshees. We had creeper balloons, TNT goodie bags, a homemade Ghast piñata and Texas sheet cake. Yeah, I don’t really know what half of those things are either… ask Steve.
In the barn we set-up rented tables and chairs and created a full-length buffet of our primarily Grandma and Granddad-supplied child Russian roulette games: Soggy Doggy, Pie Face, Bean Boozled, and Toilet Trouble. I put Kai’s dad Robby in charge of Pie Face and he put so much whipped cream on the hand, it struggled to smack kids in the face. I knew Robby was the man for the job.
Outside we had the ninja line and the Swerfer and the zipline and a giant mud pit with straw bales where you could slip and slide and pretend to shoot each other with Nerf guns because all the bullets were lost. Cruz’s brother Jackson won the Pokémon prize for mastering the ninja line. James declared Veronica “Queen of the Zipline.” She had to get her fill as it was down during our last playdate. Bry Bry and Devon spent the majority of the after-party deafening grown-ups via eardrum piercing surprise balloon “‘neak attacks” in the cavernous expanse of the barn’s great room. It was a crazy, filthy muckfest where every kid had to strip down for the ride home.
A party where the majority of the guests left in their skivvies?
Success.