My daughter isn't eight-years-old yet, but we celebrated her birthday today with some of her friends. The planning of her party was something my husband and I did a lot of talking about. The conversations went like this, "we really need to decide what kind of party she wants to have." Followed by, "yeah, we should get on that." And then we did nothing.
We put things off for so long it was less than a week ago when we sent out an invitation to a few of her classmates and some friends on the street here, hoping people didn't have the morning already booked. Luckily, most of her friends were able to make it giving us eleven children running around gleefully all morning.
My daughter wanted to do a game called, "Pass the Parcel." It was a game she heard about somewhere, possibly from a book given how she described it. Similar to musical chairs, you pass a package around until the music stops and the person left holding it gets to unwrap the package and have whatever is inside.
The catch though is that the package is in layers and once the first layer is opened, inside there is both an item for the opener, and a smaller package, also wrapped, that starts the game all over again. Ideally, there are lots of packages nested inside each other.
My daughter really wanted to do this as a game at her party but we needed a realistic way to accomplish it. What I came up with was a set of twelve nesting boxes I'd had for many years. I stacked them all on top of each other, affixed together with sticky dots. We now had a tower of boxes but they were empty. Instead of trying to get things that fit inside each box given that some were quite small, I put a brailled little sheets with the numbers one through twelve and randomly put them in the boxes.
Then I went shopping. Five Below and The Dollar Tree being my go-to stores for things like this. I'd like to tell you I got healthful choices or educational toys to stimulate the children's minds—but I didn't. I got the craziest candy I could find. There was a gummy pizza, a gummy cupcake and a gummy donut, all large and made of lots of individual gummy pieces. There was a box of Dots, a Hershey's chocolate bar, some M&Ms, a candy fidget spinner, a giant roll of Smarties and a box of Sour Patch Kids.
The children stood in a circle and passed the stack of boxes around and then handed my daughter or her VI friend Aditi the cards to read the number. Then they picked the matching numbered bag to find out what they got. A few times the boxes stopped on a person who already had an item. At this point they got to open another bag and pick the new prize or keep their old prize. From that point on, any extra items were available for trade when any bag was opened. In the end, everyone had a chance to trade and I think most children got something they were excited about. All in all, the game went fairly well, even though it wasn't quite what my daughter had envisioned originally.
After that there were cupcakes my husband made into faces followed by a pinata, filled with more candy. I gave them their goodie bags, which also had some candy in them, to collect the candy in from the pinata. I'm serious here, I really failed when it came to sugar content at the party here. It was way too much. I was hungry when I went to the store to shop. Next time I'm going to get toys and pass on the candy and sugary items.
That being said, the children had a wonderful time. My favorite thing was when my husband asked if they wanted him to finish off the pinata for them, thinking he could do it with one hit. Everyone agreed. When my husband hit the pinata it came off the line, splitting fully open and in two. The biggest section flew at and into Brooklyn, who had the most surprised look on her face. She caught the pinata part and, upon realizing she had a half-full container of candy no one else had noticed because they were all searching the ground, started running around the yard doing a victory lap.
Brooklynn was nice and shared candy with everyone. About that time parents arrived and took their children, now well sugared up, took their children home. It was a happy day for my daughter I think.
The Big Boy Update: My son was very unhappy at the beginning of my daughter's birthday party this morning because Whit had come over with a big Nerf gun. I thought my son would be excited to play nerf guns with him and Rayan but he just wanted to hide. He said Whit always shot him and it hurt. I thought this was what Nerf guns were about and the whole Nerf part was that they didn't really hurt. But my son was in a sensitive mood so we said no shooting at each other. After that things went well and the three boys, surrounded by mostly girls, got along well with everyone for the rest of the party.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter wanted to open her presents after some of the party guests had left today. She got some really thoughtful gifts and was thankful to everyone who gave her something. She is hard to buy for because it's not always certain what she'll be able to do successfully or be interested in. Everything she got today she not only likes, but will be able to do.
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