No, not The J. Geils Band song. No, not that summer of ‘81 bash at Pete’s place where everybody got totally messed up and a dude threw up on the rug and ran around taking his clothes off.
I’m talking about my daughter’s 4th birthday party last weekend. At our house. With 20 kids. And collectible Scandanavian glass tantalyzingly close to little grasping fingers.
Call my wife and I crazy, but we like to have our kids’ birthdays at the house. Our oldest is turing 8, and all of her parties have been at the house. They’ve all been fun events and never resulted in a 911 call. But in our town, house birthday parties are the Desert Bandicoot of entertaining. In other words, extinct. Nobody does house parties because they pay college girls in sweat pants to supervise gym parties in giant, padded rooms. They rent an indoor soccer place and bring in a sheet cake and a few cheese pizzas.
Was Caitlin’s party at Build-A-Bear? No, that was Emma’s. Jacob’s party this weekend is at the ceramics place. Evan’s is at Chuck-E-Cheese. Once the kids hit preschool, parents seem to spend every weekend wandering from one party factory to another, like desert nomad child herders toting wrapped gifts with the receipt attached. The birthday party industry in my town is now bigger than Bear Stearns & Co. (Business idea: Build-A-Bear Stearns, with jelly bean bonuses and self-sticking layoff notices)
Parents, don’t be intimindated by the idea of a house birthday party. The biggest hassle is cleaning up. All my wife and I did is cook up a big batch of mac and cheese, mix a huge bowl of fruit salad and bake a nice cake. It was was princess party, so we bought a bunch of cheap princess hats for the girls and plastic knight’s helmets and tunics for the boys. There was pin the tail on the unicorn and since it was a half-decent day, we had an Easter egg hunt. It will pretty much be the same thing at my older daughter’s party next month, except we’ll rent one of those inflatable bouncy castles. It still ends up cheaper than a factory party and I think it's more memorable. One of my daughter’s friends even wore her helmet and tunic to preschool the next day.
It’s simple: Feed them and get them outside, so they can run around. Hopefully, they’ll keep their clothes on and not throw up on the rug.