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What I've learned on birthdays

We do family birthday parties here for our children every year (they have friends parties the year they turn 5, 10, 13, 16 at least that’s the plan right now!). We keep the party small- inviting my parents, brother and family, sister and boyfriend, Mr. Steady’s parents, my grandmother and also my one Uncle and Aunt (they specifically asked to be included in the kids parties so we do.) So right now we host 17 people including us. This is quite doable considering Maiden’s first birthday I held 2 parties back to back- one for my side of the family and one for Mr. Steady’s side (as there were 26 people in Mr. Steady’s immediate family at the time and 22 in my extended family that expected invitations- we could not have them all in our home at one time). I then turned around and did this again for Sassafras’s first birthday (2 parties both bigger now as the families had grown). By the time Mr. Conductor came around I just couldn’t face holding 2 parties and we looked into renting our church’s family life center but both Mr. Steady and I didn’t want to go to all that expense. [Note: I only ever did this for first birthdays- ah, if only I’d never started . . . .]
So we decided not to have the big party at all (after all Mr. Conductor wouldn’t care). We decided to just invite my immediate family and grandmother and Mr. Steady’s parents. Unfortunately this blew up in our faces some what and caused a bit of a family ruckus which has now lead us to include my aunt and uncle (and we are now all happy again).

And being the sociable people we are (abounding in hospitality- LOL), we don’t just invite everyone for cake and ice cream; we invite them for a full out meal (plus cake and ice cream). The first few years, Mr. Steady and I did all the cooking (including appetizers etc.). This got to be way too much pressure and such for us. My mother suggested we let them help by bringing one of the dishes for the meal and that is how our current tradition was born. We let the birthday kid choose the meal and then assign different parts of it to different family members. This also helps with the clean up as I don’t have to store as many leftovers or clean so many dishes!

Birthday parties don’t have to be stressful affairs or cost a horrid amount of money. We have made some lovely traditions that enhance birthdays here without costing us time, money and sanity.