A few years ago I wrote a marginally clever post about kid’s birthday parties and how they should be held in the summer months if at all possible. You spend a few hundred bucks on a bounce house, order some cheap pizza, a cake, and you’re done.
Let us know and every effort will be made to attend. Our own party was a few weeks ago and was fairly successful. A handful of kids, the aforementioned pizza and cake and she was content. To her a birthday party is nothing more than an extra large play date, a day when a bunch of friends are able to come over at once. The presents are nice and the cake is a treat but it’s the friends, particularly the friends with parents that we don’t know , the ones that she doesn’t typically see outside of school, that are the highlight.
It was one of these moms that said something that stuck with me. After unnecessarily apologizing for being late she mentioned that the family was currently camping, a place that I know to be almost an hour away, and that she’d be back in a few hours to pick her daughter up. After expressing my surprise that she was willing to do that much driving just so her kid could run around my back yard for a few hours she shrugged, stating that they always make as much effort as possible to ensure a happy birthday for anybody gracious enough to invite them to the celebration.
I don’t know if there is a backstory there, a party in the past that nobody came to or invitations that weren’t given, but when an invite she had forgotten to give us was found in my daughter’s backpack last week plans were re-arranged at the last minute and she went.
She was the only one that did.
Spend even a small amount of time scrolling through parenting groups on Facebook and you’ll come across a story about a poor kid who didn’t have anybody come to their party. The reasons for why this happens probably vary considerably but it never occurred to me before that maybe sometimes it’s just bad luck, a party planned on a day where everybody invited was busy. We tend to go overboard, inviting anybody that we can think of, and I still spend the weeks leading up to the day worrying that she will be disappointed. I appreciate all those that come but I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t appreciate them enough.
Every kid is different, with different expectations and feelings about what a birthday party should consist of, in the same way that some adults make a bigger deal out of these things than others. If I have to go out of my way a bit to make sure that an eight year old has a good day I’m going to start trying a bit harder to make that happen.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com
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internal images courtesy of author
