The thoughts of planning birthday parties for my kids at our house fills me with total joy and excitement..
..until the actual party day itself.
I then spend every waking minute scrubbing, roaring at himself that I have NO IDEA where the pegs for the bouncing castle are, and being arsey with the kids if they are underfoot while I try to scrub the toilet.
This crappy atmosphere then continues all day in the lead up to the 2pm start time for guests to arrive at which point, myself and himself are no longer making eye contact and neither of us can believe that we’ve done it again: we’ve held our house hostage for the whole day for a two hour kid’s party.
But ladies and gentlemen, things they are a-changing as I give you a new trend in kiddie at home birthday parties – The Breakfast Birthday Party.
Increasingly, my son and his pals are getting invites for parties that start at 10am and finish at 12 noon – how genius is that?!
Here are the Pros as I see them:
1. You can only clean up and prep the night before so therefore there can be no putting it on the “Ah sure we’ll have loads of time to do that in the morning” finger.
2. Everyone is up at the crack of dawn anyway so why not get the party over and done with while energy levels are high? Making everyone hang on until 2pm means you have to factor in toddler naps and from my experience, they always get screwed up on Party Day anyway.
3. If the party finishes at noon, you then get your house AND your life back for the rest of the day! Having a party that ends at 5pm can teeter into perilous ‘ah sure we’re here now so we’ll hang on until bedtime territory’ (you know what I’m talking about).
4. Certain folk (*coughs* my dad) can be outraged that there is no booze on offer at his grandkid’s parties and yes, I am inclined to agree at times that drinking through it is the only way. But even my party animal dad would be hard pressed to look for a beer at 10am and so the party remains exactly that – a kid’s party!
5. Breakfast is served! How much fun would it be to serve pancakes, bacon, eggs and pastries at a breakfast party, rather than jam the kids all full of sweets right before their parents try to get them home and settled for bed time?
6. Time is irrelevant as far as your kid is concerned – they are just delighted to have a day that is dedicated to them and to have their friends call over to hang out. Whether that is at 10am or 3pm won’t make any difference to them – the point is, that their day was made special!
7. Morning times are good for sunshine. I live in North County Dublin and we seem to be rain-free most mornings until just after lunch when the rain always makes an appearance. So breakfast parties can absolutely be an outdoor event while the going is good!
8. You can drink all the coffee. All of it.
Is this a no-brainer or what?!
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