Back to the 50's

Kinda hard to recreate the 50's in a Federation house.

Cuties

The Chocolate Game

This is what they're all hoping to get a bit of....

The Cake.  Yes, I know. But it tasted fantatsic and every singles skerrick was eaten.  That's mango swirl icecream there.

Disaster

Averted

When Ruby and Nina were little I thought I was pretty clever to have had children born two years and one day apart. One party, all the friends and family catered for in a single event, easy peasy. Of course the parties weren't actually that easy peasy, and by the time Nina was in kindergarten the sorts of games and activites that were suitable for 4 year olds didn't really cut it for 6 year olds. And thus ended joint birthday parties.

But now, doing parties on back to back weekends is, I admit, pretty tiring. However low key I think it'll be, it always involves at least a major tidying the house (and clean up of my sewing room whihc is also our dining room - not a small task), a fair bit of thinking and planning for games and such and quite a bit of cooking.

Because Nina was born the day after Ruby I always feel a bit guilty that her birthday comes in the wake of the previous days excitement and treats and cake and goodies. So I do try pretty hard to make sure that Nina's party doesn't feel second best, or like an after thought (even though one year we did delay it by six whole months.....).

This year I reckon we put on a very good show. Despite what I said in the previous post about not focusing much on the decorations, Nina wanted a 50's theme (we've been watching 'Grease', that's the only explanation I can come up with) and decorations seemed the only way to make that theme actually resonate. I couldn't think of much about 50's culture itself that I really wanted to replicate in party form. So we played Elvis and decorated with polka dots and bunting and the kids got decked out in skirts and bobby socks and that sufficed.

We played old fashioned party games, most I remembered from my own childhood - the chocolate game, passing the life savers toothpick to toothpick, musical statues, hot potato (our reverse sort of pass the parcel which avoids the need for a billion layers of wrapping paper) and various team games. I'm always pleasantly surprised by how much kids, even sophisticated kids with lots of technology and entertainment at their fingertips, still love party games. Warms my heart. The cake was, of course, the standard ice cream cake with lollies thrown on it. I swear these are getting worse with each party. Pretty soon they'll just be a carton of icecream and the guests can add their own lollies. I'm not sure that anyone will care much.