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Rookie Mom

Parents invite stress with elaborate parties

By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published April 16, 2006

When my son recently turned 3, my husband and I took him and his two sisters to a petting farm in Tampa for his birthday party. We chased chickens, patted goats and slid down a slide from a hay loft. Then the five of us sat at a picnic table next to the lake, he opened his four presents, we cut into a homemade cake, sang Happy Birthday and headed home. It was definitely the easiest birthday we'd ever had and one of the best.

I felt ridiculous when I flashed back five years when my oldest turned 4 and we had a triple birthday party with two other children and about 30 friends and their parents at that same farm. By the time everybody saw the animals and got a turn down the slide I think I was no longer talking to my husband because he had forgotten to video the pony ride and failed to put the bag of juice boxes in the car. I pulled out the adorable Publix cake with fluffy farm animals made of icing but my daughter was in tears because one of the other birthday girls had a hot pink Barbie cake. My other daughter, then 2, got totally lost in the crowd until someone noticed she was inches away from wading into the lake.

Of course the year before we had celebrated my daughter's third birthday party with two other children using a circus theme. The two other mothers and I made invitations that slid out of animal cages fashioned from construction paper. We labored over cupcakes with licorice strings for tiger whiskers and elephant ears. Find me one 3-year-old who likes licorice. At the party we had a popcorn machine, cotton candy maker, moon bounce, and the obligatory clown. But you could barely hear the clown telling of his amazing feats of magic over the low roar of 30 3-year-olds soaring on sugar.

Instead of learning my lesson on my first daughter I insisted that her younger sister deserved to have creative, exciting parties, too. So she had a marching band party at age 2 with about 14 guests and their parents with homemade drums and maracas. When she turned 3 we had a cowboy party because that's what she wanted. The themes were simple enough with no-frills games like pin the tail on the donkey and breaking pinatas. But any time you have 20 to 30 people in your house you're a little too busy to really focus on the birthday child.

A friend of mine groans when she thinks of the time she stayed up until the wee hours of the morning making 22 individual gingerbread houses for her 7-year-old daughter and her friends to decorate the next day. She glued graham crackers together with egg whites. She made sure the whites were from pasteurized eggs, mind you, so there was no chance of anyone getting salmonella. To this day, the now-16-year-old remembers her gingerbread birthday party as the worst one ever because it was so "boring." Good thing she knew to wait a few years later to tell her mother that.

This begs the question. Who are we having the party for. The child? Or is it the annual opportunity for mothers to show off their culinary skills, their lovely home or how gosh darn creative they are? Or is every single gingerbread house or hand painted place mat evidence of how much we love our children?

I console myself and my guilt when I think how we have overdone it in the past when I hear of other parties. I know of fifth-graders who took a limo to the movies. There were the 5-year-olds who went to Limited Too for a tutorial on how to read price tags and match outfits. A friend of mine went to a princess birthday party near Orlando where a horse-drawn carriage gave 4-year-olds rides around the neighborhood.

FAO Schwartz, the up-up-upscale toy store in New York City, offers sleepover birthday parties for ages 6 and up for $25,000. Yes, that is $25,000 for 16 children who get an ice cream party, lessons on the "Dance On" piano and rides on a 3-D motion simulator. They sleep in sleeping bags and have a continental breakfast when they leave.

Now, no sane person pays $25,000 for a child's birthday party. But I have learned that sometimes Mom is happier to just write a check, a much, much smaller check, and have the party somewhere else. If someone else does all the work, Mom is happier. And if Mom is happier, everybody is happier.

I recently heard of one mom who was a little too tightly wound by the time the guests arrived for her child's mammoth party. Another mother was reaching for a napkin off the food table to make a cushion in the back of her toddler's shoe because a blister had begun to bleed.

"I'd really rather you not take any napkins before we serve the cupcakes, there's only one napkin per cupcake," the hostess told her.

"But my son has this blister and he's going crazy about it," the mother offered.

"But, like I said, there's only one napkin per cupcake," the hostess reiterated.

"How about if we take a napkin now but we don't have one with our cupcake," the mother pleaded.

The hostess finally gave in: "okay, that will work as long as you remember you don't get a napkin later."

Another sign that parents are getting carried away is the fact that you can now register what gifts your child would like at stores such as Toys "R" Us and Borders Books and Music. Borders doesn't call it an official registry, but parents can pick books their child would like then put them on reserve behind the cash register. At Toys "R" Us, the kids can actually go around with a handheld scanner to create a list that guests can request when they come in to shop.

Even some young brides feel a bit uncomfortable dictating what people should give them. But when a 5-year-old has to ward off the chance that she might get two identical Magical Mermaid Barbies or two copies of Charlotte's Web, that's too much. Parents need to teach children they should be happy with whatever their friends choose to give. Also most things can be returned even without a receipt, donated or re-gifted.

Now, re-gifting is a whole other can of birthday worms. I have no problem being the re-gifter or the re-giftee. But others think giving a gift that someone else gave you is in bad taste. I say anything to keep it simple - the party, the gift and those awful goodie bags - tastes fine to me.

Katherine Snow Smith's Rookie Mom column runs regularly in the south Pinellas editions of the Times. You can reach her by e-mail at snowsmith@verizon.net or write Rookie Mom, St. Petersburg Times, PO Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731.

[Last modified April 16, 2006, 08:42:00]