My daughter will be eight years old this fall, which means that I’ve become experienced in organising five parties for her as well as two for her little brother. Besides, I’ve attended dozens of parties as a guest all around Los Angeles. I learned a few things after the fourth birthday celebration. Nobody tells you those things before your first kids birthday party, when you’re working hard gluing tissue flowers in the middle of the night.
Decorations aren’t memorable. That’s the first thing I’ve learned, losing the whole weekend for crafting things that my daughter couldn’t remember even when she had grown older and was asked about those events. The only thing she remembered from that party is that her cousin got stuck on the tunnel slide and everybody started laughing until the birthday girl fell over. Children remember what happened, not what hung from the ceiling.
First parties are organised for the parents
Now I understand the logic behind the organisation of the first parties. You aren’t organising the party for a one-year-old child who will sleep most of the time. You organise it for yourselves and grandparents as well as for the album with photos, and it’s not wrong as long as you know it. My mistake was carrying the first party idea into the years when a child becomes the main recipient of celebrations.
At the age of four, the party either succeeds or fails according to one parameter only – whether the kids got the opportunity to move. Since that time, all the parties I’ve organised or visited are divided into those that succeeded and those that failed. The parties organized in a restaurant or living room where kids were expected to stay and sit along with adults – they failed. The parties built around spaces specially designed for children’s bodies – they went fine by themselves.
That’s what made me do some research concerning how other people choose kids birthday parties all around Los Angeles. The pattern I found among those families was the same as in my own photo roll. Movement first. Everything else is an addition.
The spreadsheet year
For the third party, I’ve decided to do everything by myself in a rented room. I’d like to share the expenses with all of you as a public service. Room rental, tables and chairs, pizza delivery, juice, cake ordered in bakery, balloons, paper stuff, and a hired teenager who was helping me: it cost me almost nine hundred dollars and that amount doesn’t include my own work – two days of preparations and shopping, the whole party spent running between the food table and the door and the teardown that finished with me vacuuming the glitter at 7 o’clock in the evening in the room I had to return spotless.
Kids birthday parties at Fun Play World
In the next year, we booked a party package at Fun Play World on West Pico Boulevard and I want to be more accurate in describing changes that happened because it was more than the question of money. The Adventure package cost us $2300 for two hours, twenty kids, thirty adults, two helpers, pizzas, juice boxes, drinks, and grip socks for everyone. More expensive than my DIY year? Sure. But I arrived at the party where my child was celebrating her birthday twenty minutes before the guests, holding nothing but the cake topper and left holding nothing but my kids. The staff did everything related to feeding the kids, organising the right timing and cleaning the mess. For the first time, I had not memories of managing the party but memories of the party itself. My husband said afterwards that it was the first birthday where he watched our daughter all the time. And it was the end of spreadsheet discussions in our household.
What the other parents notice at their kids birthday parties
It’s one of the things you realise only being the host of the birthday parties for years – the other parents are also having a party, and their experience moves. People talk on pickup lines. A party where the grown-ups stand awkwardly in a garage becomes a story; the same as a party where two adults per family came for free, sat at the table, had drinks and two hours of conversations while the playground was absorbing their children.
Our Santa Monica friends book the second location at 828 Pico Boulevard for the same reason we use the Los Angeles one – the parents leave as happy as the kids, and on the Westside this reputation moves very quickly.
The actual advice I give to other parents now
If another party parent asks me what he should do, I give him my advice as simple as possible. Forget about Pinterest and put all your efforts into making the guest list. Schedule two hours, not four. Feed everybody at the same time. Make sure that you will protect ten minutes for cake as if it is a state ceremony, because it’s the only thing which everybody will photograph. And think honestly whether you want to be the organiser of the event or a participant – then choose your venue according to your choice, not only according to your budget. All the information how the package party works, including our own, is available at funplayworld.com and the packages page explains itself much better than I can.
Five parties in, the whole planning process requires one phone call and one decision regarding the cake topper. My daughter thinks that I have become a good party planner. The truth is that I’ve just stopped doing the things that weren’t a party in the first place.
