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June 21, 2023 10:07 AM

Ontario mom's brutally honest kid birthday invitation goes viral.

Full disclosure: I used to work alongside this mom years ago at the hospital. She was a delightful oddball then (and this is coming from a fellow oddball) and I am glad to see she appears to have stayed that way.

And in relation to the increasing elaborateness of said children birthday parties, this Newfoundland mom says parents should opt out of them when it gets ridiculous.

posted by Kitteh (22 comments total)

Ryan (rhymes with Brian)

😄
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am SO glad that the needle appears to have swung back towards sane birthday parties. My grandchild is turning 2 in a month and my daughter's party invitations read something like, "it's a playdate at the playground. There will be pizza, bubbles and cake. No presents necessary" and I think that's perfect.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:25 AM on June 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

I approve of adult juice.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:29 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I remember being so disappointed that I was expected to stay with instead of dropping off when my kid was little. I understand the parents not wanting that many kids to watch but oy. I think my parents managed by only letting me have 1-2 friends over +family till age 9 or so for birthdays.

Kids don't care about anything but cake, presents, and running around screaming. Don't need a theme for that.
posted by emjaybee at 10:45 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also there's a pool so as far as most kids are concerned that's all the magic that's needed.
posted by cirhosis at 10:54 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Even that invitation sounds like more theme and activities than I ever put together for my son, not counting his bar mitzvah and one year where we took a bunch of kids to a bowling alley because that year everyone in his class was doing Activity parties so we felt pressured to do one too. But every other year it was have 6-8 friends over, watch a movie that my kid picked, eat grocery store ice cream cake, and once the kids were old enough it would continue into a sleepover that ended with pancakes. I would buy one big helium balloon and a paper tablecloth of whatever licensed character he liked that year. The high points for my son were picking the movie and - when he got older - ”helping” design the evite. (I did not let him send that one).

There’s a part of me that sees videos of elaborate kids’ parties and feels like a terrible mom. I like being creative and (the idea of) making fun parties! But it’s too late to change now, and I can’t imagine spending the $$$ it would take to do it, for a kid who was thrilled with our phoned-in versions instead.
posted by Mchelly at 11:06 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is great, thanks for sharing. And yeah playing around in the pool with pizza and some drinks sounds like a perfect 4-5yo birthday party.
posted by sauril at 11:12 AM on June 21, 2023

We had a keg at my kids' birthday parties. We never needed to ask any parents to stay; they did so happily :)
posted by COD at 11:15 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

My son's got a summer birthday. For his first two birthday parties we had a bbq at our house and then after that we started having it in a local park. There's fields to run around in, a playground, and splashpad so there's lots to do. His 9th is coming up soon and we asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday and once again he wants it at the park.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:29 PM on June 21, 2023

This mom sounds fun.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:53 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Glad I had kids when all you needed was a cake, juiceboxes, a yard, and beer.
That invite was hilarious. I would gladly crash that party!
posted by Thorzdad at 2:35 PM on June 21, 2023

I’ve had friends do a candy buffet table - just a table with a selection of bulk bin candies - and slap a movie on. Done and done!
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:16 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a parent of two kids, putting on birthday parties is actually pretty hard, so I get moms being try-hards about it. Lots of kids don't care about movies, hate sheet cakes from the store, go nuts about party games (either have to win or hate to lose) so assuming they do is kind of a crapshoot. Kids also judge and tell parents, same as uppity parents do.

Also attending birthday parties can be a chore, especially if your kid has a large class and their friends or you just went to some other kid's birthday the previous weekend day. So another crappy sheetcake and two hours of activities can basically be punishment.

I salute that this woman was honest about her planning and probably agree with her disinterest in awesome kids birthday parties. Sometimes you just have to take the hit.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:25 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I had a baby in my room at work. When he turned one, mom brought invitations for the staff (um, no I'm going to hang out with you or your friends on a Saturday). It was coco-melon (yuck) themed. Which, whatever. But she wrote on the invitation to bring a gift and have fun, with his diaper/clothing sizes.

I must just be an old, but that seemed tacky to me. Knowing this mom for a while longer, I'm not surprised in the least. At least she didn't give invitations for his 2nd birthday.
posted by kathrynm at 5:16 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

As the parent of a child who is not yet old enough for “real” birthday parties: if this invitation is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
posted by TangoCharlie at 9:02 PM on June 21, 2023

The birthday parties have become competitive. I'll bet her party is more fun for everybody. I did have 1 party for my son at the water park and it was fun, but mostly we went to a beach or park, except it usually rained, so it was at home with squirtguns and messes. Little kids don't do well for very long and many birthday parties are too long and too elaborate. Why, yes, I did learn from experience.
posted by theora55 at 9:51 PM on June 21, 2023

Oh boy.

I just did my daughter's 6th birthday. She's a social butterfly. She knows everyone.

She's also extremely particular about how things must be. She'd been to like, seven parties in the weeks prior, taking notes, making plans. I had hoped to do a 5th, but we got Influenza B that month and it was just a no go, so she had two years of solid contemplation on the matter.

It needed to have music. And dancing. And games. And a pinata.

Pinatas in Australia may or may not conform to international expectations. We don't generally have a lot of Latin influence here so mostly everyone gets a whack or two at the thing and when it goes, the lot of them descend like Hollywood piranhas on a bleeding tourist. It's brutal and 100% a concussion risk because all these four foot high children form a line and the ones at the back, well, as soon as there's even the vaguest wiff of blood in the water boom, they're gunna dash as fast as their tiny legs can cart them into the Danger Zone. Aussie kids party culture generally requires parents stay, for the younger kids at least, so I've been roped into Meat Shield duty at almost all of the parties we've been to. I help out around school and have a Lot of Voice so am well known around the junior school, and can get them into a neat line 90% of the time, and it still does things to my blood pressure, even just being around crepe paper at the moment is a lot.

But we nailed down a few things with Miss Potato's party - unicorn theme, we'd take some musical instruments (Dad's a muso so we have a lot) and play Musical statues, do a pinata, hold the whole thing at a local park so they can just go do swings and whatnot the rest of the time.

First mistake was that the kid insisted we print out her invitations 'like a poster'. Just black and white. She and I knocked it up on Canva so she was all about it, lots of unicorns, stars, sparkles, the works. No names on it besides hers, so she didn't have to worry about spelling. She has classmates from a wide range of backgrounds, and frankly, she's six, so that's fair enough.

Then there's distribution.

"You have to email this to Friend's mummy, so she doesn't forget."
"Sure thing..."
"And Child, she's my best friend, you have to make sure she comes too."
"I thought Other Creature was your best friend?"
"Oh, yes! Send it to her too, and she can bring her sister!"
"What about just giving them to her in at school?"
"But I want to be sure!"

I comply. I printed thirty. 26 kids in her class, so I figured she'd give one each, we'd have about a one third failure rate, maybe fifteen to twenty kids if we include siblings. Most of her friends are one-and-dones but there's a few with toddlers.

We get to school and she rounds up her two most extroverted friends, divides the stack and hands them each a third. They nod. "Let's do this" and fuck, she's worked out street teams from first principles. I should know better. Street teams! The three of them took off in opposite directions, running their own promotion racket.

Because I'm around the school a fair bit in the weeks leading up to the party I keep getting adults I sort of know on sight, but couldn't name, amble up to me and be all "can't wait for the party! Sounds fun!"

I'd send an electronic copy of the invite to maybe five or six kids. She took that to mean she didn't need to give them an invitation at all, and redistributed. Then there was one kid who was absent, and so she asked if she could have some spares to go in her bag for when she came back to school. Like a chump I gave her six more.

I wound up inviting almost fifty kids. Fifty!

Then I was told their were a few coeliac kids coming. Not just gluten intolerant, but look-at-a-baguette-and-be-hospitalised level coeliac. So the whole thing wound up needing to be gluten free, because by this stage I had at least ten toddler sibs of the nose-picking variety coming and the odds of cross-contamination were astronomical. Goodie bags get well complicated too when you can't include lollies with gluten in them, but I hoard small toys and stickers all year in the event of this sort of complication, so I sit myself down in front of some junk TV and knock out thirty loot bags.

Day comes and it's like the start of a music festival. Just a stream of cars at my poor little park. I'd worked out some food solutions and had catered for double what I expected, but it was relentless. And there were like, a few families who brought full on extras, like one of them was the kid next door who "just gets lonely sometimes" and basically invited herself. Ten year old girl named Swan. Good kid, just....very spontaneous. And way more toddlers than expected. And a kid from another class she doesn't actually like and who kept climbing onto the table to sit in the bowls? Not ND or anything, he just wanted to be where the food was, which would have been ah, tolerable, at least, if he didn't have that small kid fascination with his own genitalia and no problems with getting cheeze dust on his junk between mouthfuls. I can't personally do anything about it because being a well-known school mum means that despite norms a good chunk of the people who came were totally chill with leaving their kids with me. Flattered, in a way, but that's a lot of supervision of children and not enough supervision of food. Luckily one of my bestie mums was there and she did Food Watch, which besides the table sitter included another who just wanted to lick the chocolate off the biscuits before returning them and another who just wanted to make Cheezel rings on each finger before putting them back. I owe her my ongoing gastrointestinal health.

And it got steadily more insane. There were factions on the playground that I had hitherto not been aware of. There was a three way split and the birthday girl absconded to go 'camping in the woods with the fairies' and had to be retrieved. My son attempted to get the six year olds to play a complex musical call-and-reply game which just disintegrated into them shouting "POO" or "WEE!" at him every time it was their part, so he had a meltdown at this disrespect of his creative vision and went to have a cry in the carpark, and also had to be retrieved.

We ran out of drinks despite having made ten litres of punch and another superstar mum did a run to a local supermarket for cordial, diluted to just within consumability. We ran out of sweets. We ran out of crisps. We did not run out of gluten free finger sandwiches, which is a tragedy on its own. The cake had to be cut into almost inch square pieces so there was enough. The table sitter had to be repeatedly told not to stick his fingers into it as it was on fire.

And then the formal games commenced.

Musical statues was fine. We dodged the tantrums by inviting disqualified kids to "join the band!" instead of just kicking them out, so I had the whole lot shaking, clapping, singing and plinking away by the end of it. That one was a keeper. We started with a toy piano only, my eldest who is almost ten plinking out his favorites and then everyone else disqualified picking up an instrument and going for it. I think it helped that I know all them kids by name too, so it was genuinely fun, no one felt picked on. I hadn't planned for their ruthlessness in combat and wound up awarding five winners, which seems like a lot but the field was substantial.

But the pinata...no-one died, and that's all that matters. Long line. Nerf cricket bat. Hung it on a long chain from a tree branch away from the general public and my six foot tall plus Dr Jilder dealt with the mechanics while I held back the queue. I don't know if its a problem anywhere else but Aussie commercial pinatas tend to be way, way too tough. I actually made some tactical cuts in the thing and re-enforced the supports holding it to the tether, but it was still tough in all the wrong places. I wound up making a tactical decisions and stacking the front of the line with known cricket players but it still took way way too long. And even when it cracked it was superficial and in the end I tossed it to the ground and let the little Maenads tear it apart with their bare hands. We ran out of goodies real quick and I had to improvise, awarded our fiercest thumper the head and then that was a wholeass thing, I had to divide the carcass according to rank and station, awarding factional heads their fair portion as decided by the sparkliness of the remains, but everyone left happy at least.

I ran out of goody bags and I had two kids leave early without them, so of the fifty Ms Potato invited about thirty to thirty five showed up, not far off my original estimates in terms of percentages but fuck me. Madness. You couldn't pay me to do a party in my actual home. They'd devour me wholesale. I can't fathom the sheer bravery.

My son turns 10 in a few weeks. He's planning on going to a movie with one, maybe two friends, and no flyers will be involved.

Ms Potato for her part is planning a Halloween "dance party movie night sleepover".

I'm planning on hiding under a rock.
posted by Jilder at 9:57 PM on June 21, 2023 [34 favorites]

Piñata[woot! Jilder] is it? When my son turned 9 we hosted a bday party for six boys with a piñata, a cake and A Lot of grapeshot popcorn. Because boys, I constructed the piñata out of cardboard boxes to represent an aeroplane with 1.5m wingspan complete with battery-operated rotating propeller. Nobody lost an eye but the licensed violence of whacking the piñata triggered general mayhem. It took about as long to clean up as the actual party. Would do it again.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:48 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

We had my son’s 12th bday party at a barcade with family hours on Saturday afternoon. Rolls of quarters for the kids, open tab for the adults and a giant 14” donut for a birthday cake. It was the best kids party I’ve been to.
posted by slogger at 3:53 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

My child always, always wants a pinata on his birthday. During lockdown a legit pinata was not an option really, so somewhere there's a photo of him and his best friend (the only kid at his "party"), both wearing masks and standing six feet apart, swatting with a softball bat at a cardboard box full of candy hanging from a tree.
posted by daisystomper at 7:37 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

The rule of thumb I tried to stick to with my kids is the guest list is the kid's age plus one. So a five-year-old gets six guests, someone turning six gets seven guests, etc.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:56 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

My older daughter (winter birthday) always wanted theme parties. I think the favorite was "famous dogs in history", including things like a Balto inspired relay race in the snowy backyard. Mostly because the dads did it after the kids, and that was hilarious.
posted by true at 6:05 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]