All year, Alice was jealous of anyone having a birthday before her next one came back around. "I want my birthday to be first" she would say and then pout about it NOT being her birthday yet. It is impossible to tell a 3 year old that her birthday HAD been first that year in January - before anyone elses birthday was celebrated that year. So we struggled all year long with friend's birthdays coming and going. Alice would say she didn't want to go to so-and-so's party...only because it wasn't HER birthday.
The end of the year approached and I noticed that there were about 5 kids in Alice's class with a birthday in January. I could forsee a disaster forming when more than one parent decided to plan a kids birthday on the same weekend. I had already booked Pump-It-Up for Alice's party. Now I wanted to make sure as many of the kids from Alice's class could make it, so in November, I sent out 'save the date' cards to let the other parents know - I CALL DIBS on that weekend (January 14th) and it worked.
I know Alice loves to go to inflatable playrooms, however I also know my child can be intimidated by the bigger kids and even just kids she doesn't know. Since she has been looking forward to this birthday for an entire year, I wanted to make it one for her to remember, because I think this will actually be the first one she will rememeber. With this in mind, I booked her party at Pump It Up. It was a little bit pricey but well worth the expense. With the party package there, you get to invite up to 25 kids and you have 1 1/2 hours to jump with just your friends in 2 private jump rooms, each with about 4-5 different bounce houses.
Since this was Alice's first large birthday party, we also invited the family and pretty much everyon came! Didi and Pop, Aunt Papa, Uncle Paul, Chris and Sean, Gammy, Aunt Sissy with Joci and Juliette. It was a real treat that Aunt Sissy brought Joci and Juliette a few days early to stay with us and we got to play together for 3 days.
I also knew this party could turn out to be fairly large with kids AND parent, so I asked my friend Deb to make the cake again this year. I asked it be themed "girly with rainbows and flowers" and boy did she deliver! I am so lucky to have a fabulous cake designer for a friend. She had make the cake or cupcakes for Alice's parties for the past 3 years and they are always phenominal....all the parents wanted her card.
The day of the party arrived and Alice was beyond excited. All in all about 12 classmates came and with the addition of my friends with kids and all the family in town we had about 35 people including parents. Pretty much ALL the cake was eatten (I think we had about 4 slices to take home for later) and everyone looked like they had a great time. This was the first visit to a bouncy house for Chris and Sean and they took to it with no fear.
We took all the presents back to the house to open later and the family all met back at the house to hang out for a while. Alice opened presents at a leisurely pace. I think it took her about 4 hours to get through them all. We brought in Rudy's BBQ to feed the family dinner and sat around and talked while the kids played. This was our time to host family at our house for an event and I think it went quite well...nothing broken and Alice was good about sharing, expecially with the boys.
When the day was done, everyone was exhausted, but I can safely call the day a sucess. A birthday Alice will remember (i hope).
