Time To Party: Recapping Indy’s 10th Birthday

If you’ve been reading this blog for a few years, you know kids’ parties aren’t my favourite way to spend an afternoon. I find them overwhelming – so much noise! so much mess! – but they are also so much fun for my kids and they have had a party of varying size most years since birth (for two years, when he was younger, Indy just wanted his best friend from preschool, so we’d have that friend + his parents/sibling over for supper and cake).

Thankfully, these annual celebrations have gotten progressively easier and more enjoyable (for me) as the kids have gotten older. They spearhead the activities, they have more established friendships, and parents never stay which means I don’t have to make small talk with other adults. (Hallelujah.)

This year was extra special because Indy reached the double digit milestone! It was also a “big” birthday year. In our family, we’ve made the decision to rotate “big” and “little” birthday parties. For their big parties, they can invite what I would classify as a significant number of guests (5-10)…and the little years tend to max out at 2-3 friends.

Indy settled on six close friends he wanted to come celebrate his special day. Here’s how it all shook down and what we did for entertainment, gifts, and food.

INVITE

I made an invite using a template in Canva. It took less than five minutes. I downloaded the image and texted it to parents of the kiddos he wanted to have at his party. No paper, no printing, no cost. Hooray!

TREAT BAGS

I loathe treat bags.

I begrudge how much all the little things cost. I hate the waste (most treat bag items are headed straight to the garbage). Yet there is definitely an expectation of having treat bags. For Belle, we’ve circumvented this by having a prize table with some beauty supplies (lip balm, scrunchies), candy, and other consumables (notebooks, markers, stickers). When a guest wins a game, they pick a prize – theoretically choosing something they’ll use/eat/appreciate and their collection of prizes at the end of the night is their treat bag.

I took a slightly different approach for Indy’s party…

Guests this year got three things:

• A pad of plain white paper (they come in packs of 3 for $1.25); I figure a pad of paper can be used for many, many things within a household
• An invisible ink pen (the least practical, but arguably the most fun)
• Candy (from the candy hunt; more below)

That’s it.

When they arrived at the party, I had little plastic baggies with their names ready and waiting. They grabbed those and we immediately started the candy hunt.

I grew up having a candy hunt at every birthday party, and we’ve done it most years for our kids. We hide candy on both levels of our house in main living spaces only – we don’t put any items in bedrooms, bathrooms and close the doors to those rooms. This year we divided the boys up into a group of three and a group of four and assigned each group a floor of the house. The kids are still young enough we opted to pool the candy at the end to divide it evenly (Belle did this with a friend who was over for the afternoon).

As always – and not surprisingly – the kids loved the candy hunt. We hid Hershey’s kisses and Jolly Ranchers and a handful of Rockets. Individually wrapped candy is key.

It was lots of fun to hide the candy. John handled downstairs, I hid the other half of the candy upstairs and we manned our respective floors while the boys were searching.

The boys were very thorough, but I have come across at least one Hershey’s Kiss and one Jolly Rancher this weekend.

THE FOOD

When the kids arrived I had a veggie, fruit, and cheese tray on the table. I figured if there was any hope of getting them to eat this sort of food I should put it out first. All the fruit and cheese were gone along with some of the veggies (though I think that was mostly John and I).

We also purchased a gag chip cylinder at the DollarStore. It has a hidden spring snake inside. It was HILARIOUS and the kids all loved it and wanted to trick adults with it when they came for pickup. Highly recommend and it can get used over and over and over again (ask me how I know!).

Supper was hotdogs (WE put on the toppings to match individual requests), chips, and apple-grape juice boxes. I made little name labels on pieces of masking tape to put on their juice boxes because nothing bugs me more than finding a dozen (expensive!) juice boxes that are half empty. Usually I label cups and we serve from a large jug of juice or water, but with this many very active boys, I’m glad we went with juice boxes. We opted for one flavour; if they didn’t like it, they could have water!

Indy specifically requested a DQ Blizzard Cake this year. I had no idea how much these things cost. Wowzers. They are not cheap! (Also, we could – and have – made far more delicious ice cream cakes at home for a lot less; we floated that idea by him, but because lots of his friends have recently had DQ cakes, he wanted one. It’s a first for us, and likely won’t happen again, but he loved it!)

I did love the simplicity of not having to lift a finger toward prepping the cake. Other than lighting a few candles, this was 100% outsourced which was admittedly lovely.

DECORATIONS

*Crickets*

This is it. Four or five balloons. I didn’t even hang our birthday banner. I knew none of the boys would give two hoots about decorations, I didn’t feel like decorating, so…this was it!

Indy told me his absolute favourite part of his party was playing in the living room before the final guest was picked up, batting a balloon back and forth. Mission accomplished!

GAMES

I think we knocked this out of the park. At first I didn’t know how I was going to keep this many boys engaged inside (it was drizzling – then full out raining – during the party).

Here’s what we did:

Candy hunt. Very fun, very easy, and makes up the majority of the treat bag which feels like a triple win.

Egg drop. Indy was insistent we do an egg drop. We organized the boys into two groups (unfortunately, with 6 guests + 1 birthday boy, teams were never even). I gave them all the same supplies, a time limit, and then they came up with various creative solutions to protect their egg. Both eggs survived numerous falls; the last “throw it as high in the air as you can” activity finished off one team, and the other team broke their egg while unwrapping it. Lots of fun. That said, Indy ended up with raw egg all over his pants, and another boy had it all over his sneakes so…be forewarned.

Minute to Win It. Indy loves these games and does them regularly at youth group. There are HUNDREDS of ideas online, but I wanted games that were easy, fun, and didn’t require much in terms of supplies.

I divided our hallway into quarters, and we used those markings so most games could feature kids going head-to-head against each other.

The other thing I did was write everyone’s name on a long wooden popsicle stick. I drew those randomly to determine who was going against whom.

Here are some highlights:

• A box with a tiny “door” cut in both sides. Boys start at opposite ends of the hallway and whoever can blow their pingpong ball into the hole first – NO HANDS! – wins.

• Cookie face. Competitors each lean their head back, put an Oreo cookie on their forehead and using only the muscles in their face (plus gravity), try to get it in to their mouth. The boys LOVED this game for obvious reasons. I had planned to do it outside, but because it was raining we did it in the living room and the floor was covered in Oreo crumbs. The pictures are absolutely hilarious of their facial contortions.
• Marshmallow drop. Using a straw and no hands, move marshmallows from one bowl to another using only the suction from sucking in on a straw.
• Marshmallow toss. One team member holds a cup on their head, another team member stands behind a line and tries to throw the marshmallows into the cup.

The boys also had lots of fun creating their own games with the Minute to Win It supplies. The only things I had to purchase were straws, giant popsicle sticks, and a $3.50 beer pong set (a very economical way to get Solo cups and ping pong balls, neither of which I owned). Aside from our main gift to Indy, I think the pingpong balls have been his favourite new toy. We have a highly competitive family game going right now at our dining room table. (I don’t use TikTok, but when I Googled what we’re doing, this is what came up and it’s a perfect representation of the game.)

GIFTS

Indy wanted to open his gifts early in his party, but since his guests came home from school with him on the bus, many of them dropped off gifts at different times. So…

The first gift he “opened” was his gift from us. Which was a fishtank and the promise of a fish the following day (we thought he’d enjoy being the one to pick it out)!

Indy loves fish so, so much. I was a bit bummed because I had come up with the idea of a fish months ago, and then more recently he started asking for one. But we kept deflecting his hints and I don’t think he thought there was any chance he was going to get a fish. His response to seeing it all set up in his room was everything we had hoped it would be and more – open mouth, incredulous eyes. He was so happy and appreciative.

Other gifts included a rock set (he’s very in to rocks), candy, money (some of which he’s already spent on Pokemon cards, the rest will go into savings), a gift card, mini stick balls, a new basketball and a remote control helicopter (which he loves).

OTHER NOTES

This was one of my favourite – if not my favourite – kid party ever. Indy has lovely, fun, spunky but also very sweet and respectful friends. We survived not being able to do much outside because of weather. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the games. For the twenty or so minutes before supper they watched trick shot videos on YouTube which were very much enjoyed. No one wanted to go home…

Success!

SLEEPOVER

We had another commitment later that evening but, on our way home, picked up Indy’s two closest friends – who had also been at the party – and they came for a sleepover. Indy’s first ever! It was fun, though there wasn’t much sleeping. They raided his remaining Halloween candy stash at 10:30 pm, were giggling until 11:30…and were up by 5:30 am. Oof.

I made a special breakfast per Indy’s request – Cinnamon Coffee Cake – and prepped smoothies to go along with it. They tried to do all sorts of trick shots and did summersaults on the mattresses.

And then they went home and I heaved a giant sigh of relief and ended up napping for two glorious hours that afternoon. Another birthday and another party complete!

Your turn. Most memorable birthday party? Did you enjoy sleepovers as a kid? What was your preferred birthday meal when you were younger? How about now?

Header photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash