Kaylee's Birthday

to protect our privacy I cut off the bottom of the invitation which basically was just our address and phone number

We had Kaylee's birthday party 2 weekends ago, after being sick all last week, I am just now getting around to posting about it. When asked (MONTHS ago) what she wanted for her birthday all Kaylee said was to stay in a hotel. I thought at first we would try to have a SMALL swim party at a hotel. But living in the fabulous area of the US that we live, that just couldn't happen. So we decided instead to throw Kaylee a party at the house. This is the first non all-family party for either of our children. I am new to this children's birthday party thing. And you will soon learn ALL the mistakes I made! My friend (ok more than one of my friends) kept telling me I must have been smoking crack the day I decided to invite like EVERYONE! I cant tell you exactly how many of those cute little invitations went out, I can tell you that it was a few too many! I had no idea that when people get children's birthday party invitations they actually COME! We have had MANY MANY parties at our house over the years, and this was by FAR the largest percentage of people that has ever shown up, as in like DOUBLE the percentage of our other parties! We had like 20+ children in our house, plus all the adults to go with them, which was like 25-30. It was mass chaos/craziness, it was a mad house! So much so that we forgot to even sing happy birthday to the birthday girl!.........ooops!

Here are some of the pictures from the craziness

another one of my "out of my mind" decisions, to have the children decorate their own cupcakes

one of the creations

Ainslee eating hers with a spoon

she realized quickly her hands where much more effective

Then she tried the "hands free" approach

Some of the moms thought my idea was not great, so they made their children's cupcakes for them.

Then we had to figure out where all these kids would sit while they ate their cupcakes, they pretty much figured it out by themselves........whenever they could find a space!

And here are all the gifts, after about the 3rd child who walked through the door, I wished I had put "no presents" on the invitation. This picture doesn't show all of them, it was taken after she had already opened like 6 gifts.

she sure enjoyed opening all those, and even let Ainslee open a few for her too!

It wasn't that I was completely unprepared for the party. I had multiple games ready, and ideas on how to entertain the children. But I never thought about the parents. Most of them just came and either sat down on the couch (or stood in the living room) the entire time talking to each other. Not many of them even ventured up stairs to see what their children were playing up there. It was like they dropped them off and went "off duty". Don't get me wrong we didn't have any crazy behavior from the children or anythings, we didn't even have a single broken toy, a few injuries YES (nothing serious). It just didn't go as I had thought, we will definitely be changing our strategy for the next party, not sure what yet, but something different! It was fun, I wish I would've been able to socialize more. I feel like I say that after every party though. Oh and another thing I learned from the party was that I am SO glad I have the children I have! I have seen all different types of children, and I am glad they are just the way they are!