Category Archives: parenting

Exiting the kiddo birthday party arms race

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This was the year.

Since dd was on the cusp of 3yo, we’ve been attending kiddo birthday parties that made everything I grew up with pale by comparison. Honestly, I don’t remember my friends having big birthday parties when I was a kid…although, to be fair, I primarily was close just with my bff and didn’t really get the time of day from the “cool kids” that treated me like crap. (Back then, it wasn’t cool at all to be the smart-but-short-fat-girl-with-glasses; these days, I’d be the subject of my own YA book series with an option for a 3-movie deal.)

When we attended the first of these new-fangled kiddo parties, at a mini gym, we were immediately taken with the notion of having someone else be responsible for corralling, entertaining, and then cleaning up after a classroom of kiddos. It seemed like a fantastic idea. Well, that is until we saw the price of these parties.

In most cases, it was something on the order of $300+ just for the location and the staff; then you had to add in the cost of the cake (typically store-bought, for simplicity’s sake), pizza (if it was near a mealtime), drinks, and favors. In some cases, the starting price is even higher (especially for the indoor bouncy place near us), in which case the final tally for a party would be anywhere from $400-500. For a party. For pre-schoolers.

We knew this couldn’t last.

Last year, for dd’s 6th birthday party, we did a gymnastics party at our local YMCA. The limit on kids was something like 27 or 29, including dd (it was all based on ratios of coaches:kids), and we invited her entire Kindergarten class plus a small group of neighborhood kiddos and close friends. The idea was that we would wait to see who from her class just blew it off and then we’d add in the remainder of kids we also wanted to invite. Trouble was, nobody backed out. We had 100% YES RSVPs. It was shocking, to say the least. The YMCA team, much to their credit, rallied and managed to handle the large crowd in style – especially at improvising additional games/activities when some aspects of the party took less time than anticipated. I think we all just found the party overwhelming, and then after doing a twist on the invitation game with ds’ 4th birthday party this summer (starting with the list of neighborhood kids and close friends FIRST and then inviting only select kids from day care), we just felt like we were overspending and overthinking it all.

In our neck of the woods, there are plenty of kiddo party options (outside of the house). You can be active (YMCA, indoor bouncy / gym / playarea, karate, gymnastics, etc.), you can be crafty (Joanns, Michaels, paint-your-own pottery, etc.), you can be educational (such as kid-oriented museums), and you can be outdoorsy (hayride with pumpkin picking, hiking at the nearby Audubon or state park, etc.). The options become completely overwhelming, and the cost isn’t far behind. Even the party favors end up stressing me out: let’s see if we can spend less than $100 on gifts for up to 30 kids and not make it all plastic junk toys or candy. My go-to favor solution has mostly been some kind of notebook, notepad or coloring {thing}, along with some kind of writing/drawing implement (markers, crayons, or pencils) and some form of innocuous kid-oriented food {thing}, such as Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. Buying the writing/drawing stuff from the local Job Lot or Target and the Goldfish from BJs, we typically manage to keep the price on the favors within budget…but it’s all still crazy.

So, this is the year that I pulled the brakes – to a certain extent. I didn’t say that dd couldn’t have a birthday party; I figured we needed to get her on a step-down program. What we’re doing instead is a targeted party at a local Build-a-Bear for just a very select crew. I can’t adequately describe how awful I feel at not being able to invite all of the neighborhood kids, but it’s just cost-prohibitive. For this party, we’re keeping it to just 8 kids, including dd and ds, so she had 6 invitation slots she could fill. That. Was. It.

I figured we could skip the expense of the favor (each kid is going home with a stuffy they made themselves, so I am comfortable with saying THAT is their “favor”), and I let dd pick out a scaled-down cupcake cake that should result in no leftovers and be relatively easy to wrangle in the mall food court, as we take over a table for the food portion of the party after the bears (and other assorted stuffies) have been built.

There’s a part of me that is incredibly happy to say goodbye to the era of the big party for dd; aside from the expense, the stress of trying to figure out how to maximize the experience for a large number and variety of kids is exhausting. Even dealing with the thank you cards is just some new level of insanity; my hat is totally off to the parents of ds’ preschool classmate, who put thank you cards in each favor bag. KUDOS on getting that out of the way, man.

I don’t know how this party will go. It’s tomorrow, and both kids have been stoked to go build some bears. The other kiddos invited to the party have also been jumping up and down at the thought of going, so I’m hoping this doesn’t turn out to be some kind of build-up for not much actual return for them. I just want everyone to have a good time and for it not to break the bank. A part of me also wants dd (and ds) to have the parties I just don’t remember having or going to when I was that age, even though I sincerely doubt that withholding such parties will end up severely adding to their future therapy bills.

It’s just that fine line – balancing the needs of the few (dd & ds) with the needs of the many (all the other kids) and the needs of the one (checking account). Something had to give…and we drew the line in first grade. If this works out fine, ds has only 1-2 more years of “the big party” and then he’ll start his own party step-down program. It may seem crazy to think about it this way, but did I ever mention that I’m an overthinker? Yeah…in spades.

The perils of constantly questioning whether you’re the worst mom ever

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Being a parent is a tricky thing. You made some kind of choice – either explicit or implicit – that you were willing to bring a child into the world, and then you’re responsible for making sure that child is allowed to grow to the point where it can leave the proverbial nest. As my father (and Bill Cosby?) said, a parent’s responsibility is to civilize a child so they can survive in society. But really, there’s very little that prepares you for the constant nagging feeling that you’ve chosen wrong with just about everything you decide on your child’s behalf.

I discussed some of my concerns when we first put dd into summer camp last year, because she spent the better part of four weeks being utterly miserable. She hated camp. She didn’t want us to go each morning at drop-off. She wanted to be picked up early so she wouldn’t have to endure post-camp. Everything was awful, and she made that abundantly clear. For the better part of four weeks, I vacillated between thinking “OH DEAR LORD SHE’S RIGHT AND I’M SCARRING MY CHILD’S PSYCHE” and “This, too, shall pass.”

Whether by hope or just the passage of sufficient time for her to adjust to the new norm, she settled down sometime in that four weeks and suddenly, dramatically, fell madly in love with camp. It got to the point that she was terribly sad when she finished camp at the end of the summer and headed off to Kindergarten.

Figuring that we’d capitalize on her newfound love of camp, we set about putting her back in the same program this summer, timed to coincide with our return from our trip to DC. She got 1-1/2 weeks of gymnastics camp, then we had vacation, then she went back to her regular camp. And everything was fine. For all of one day.

By the time she’d gotten home from that first day, she decided that camp was (yet again) the worst thing EVER. And this time, with only five weeks of camp in front of her, she was going to drag this out as the worst experience for all of us if we didn’t fix it. The nagging concerns came back to the forefront of my brain again, wondering if we should’ve just left her in the gymnastics camp all summer. It was about the same cost, but the difference in commute (compounded by the fact that the location of that camp almost certainly requires that I’m on the only one who can get her) meant that I’d have to give up any hope of evening workouts in the gym, post-work. So, we all soldiered on.

I made her an advent calendar, of sorts, and challenged her to cross off each day at its conclusion and then write what she liked about camp at the end of each week. When we got to the end of the last day of the last week, I asked her to write down three things she liked about camp and to tell me which camp she wanted to go to next summer: regular camp or gymnastics camp. I fully expected to see her write GYMNASTICS CAMP in bright, shiny, blinking letters. Instead, she wrote REGULAR CAMP.

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

It turns out, what dh and I were missing this entire time was that the difference between her pre-K camp and her first grade camp was that she didn’t get nap time. And, the difference between her first grade camp and the other camps at higher levels (2nd grade on up) is that the camps for older kids got at least one field trip per week. In other words, first grade camp is a total screw job where you’re trapped in one location and don’t even get a nap for your trouble. OH. It all makes sense now.

Fast forward to Sunday, when I brought dd to her first day of “pre-team” gymnastics training. It’s a 2hr session for girls who are interested in taking their gymnastics to the next level. Girls who really excel are invited to take on a second 2hr session every week, so that’s something to keep an eye out for. She’d been up and down about going pre-team, but she loves gymnastics and has shown quite an aptitude for it. When I finally got her registered for pre-team (no small feat), she looked at me as though I’d just knifed all her favorite stuffed animals. She’d asked for pre-team repeatedly, but that wasn’t the same as getting it. And so, for weeks, she alternated between planting her feet and taunting us with “I WON’T GO” and telling her friends, “I’m doing pre-team!”

{cue a very large palm-print on my forehead}

So, I took her on Sunday, and I was unsurprised that she hung on me tighter than any plastic wrap. I brought her into the gym, and she cried and clawed at me, begging me to stay. I managed to pry her off me, and eventually a coach led her off to sit with the other girls. I saw some sniffling, but it disappeared quickly. The start of class was slow, since it was the first time for this session and there were a ton of new girls (like dd), but this helped her get acclimated. She stretched, followed all the directions, and – amazingly – paid incredible attention to the coaches. She didn’t even gnaw on her fingernails, as she so often does; she was that engrossed in what they were teaching her. As she ran and pranced past me in the whirling mass of 6-13 year-olds, warming up, she would look for me at the window and wave, smiling brightly.

At her first water break, she bounded out for her water bottle and teased me for not leaving it in the gym. At the second break, she pulled me down to the locker room for girl talk while she had a bio break, and as she shut the bathroom stall door, she shouted at me, “I want to compete on pre-team!” I was nearly in tears. The idea that we’d possibly gotten it right was something that I kept in the back of my mind, because the pulling and crying and yelling and denials always end up pushing self-doubt forward and self-confidence to the back. Always.

I wonder if it’s like this for all parents…or just for some of us?

She asked me to take her to pre-team again next Sunday, and I’m looking forward to it. She said that I can go workout elsewhere in the gym, which I’d like to do, although there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to spend the entire 2hr stretch on a treadmill. Really, I want to watch her excel and smile…because sometimes the validation I need as a parent is what isn’t told to me. Sometimes, it’s just seeing the look on her face and understanding that – this time – I didn’t get it wrong.

Let’s talk about SEX…and VIOLENCE?

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The other day, I was in the kitchen doing kitcheny-type things (dishes or preparing dinner, I can’t remember which), when DD came up beside me and said something that sounded like the word “sex”. I paused, turned towards her and calmly said, “Excuse me?” She looked at me with a huge grin on her face and said – much louder and more clearly – “SEX!” It’s at this point that I think I made a face much like Ferris Bueller, whenever he gave a glance at the fourth-wall. Uh…

It seems that the little miss, inspired by the kid-requested heavy rotation of the “Pitch Perfect” soundtrack, had decided to latch onto the word “sex” from the Treblemakers’ cover of Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” during the “Riff-Off” medley. Hmm. At this point, I took a quick breath and decided to explain that sex is something between two consenting adults in a committed relationship and how the song is about wanting to TALK about sex before actually DOING anything that would ruin a relationship. Her eyes glazed over and she wandered off, fairly bored and having her sex balloon completely deflated. Score 1 for me?

[Of course, I don’t think that my description of sex is a 100% accurate case; there are plenty of folks who’ve had more than 2 people involved, and “adults” is a bit of a strong term, and “committed” is a state of mind and and and…but I wasn’t in it for accuracy; I was aiming to get her to think it was more than just a game, like “Monopoly Junior”.]

DD has seen movies aplenty before, mostly in the house, and I even screened “Pitch Perfect” for her fairly recently. And sure, the movie has a few mature things in it here and there – but that’s the whole “P” in “PG” – parental guidance. I remember seeing “No Way Out” with my father, on VHS no less, and he sent me out of the room when the infamous limo scene came on. He then called me back out and replayed the scene, explaining that it was a 3 out of 10 in terms of sexual content. Apparently, he was so disappointed in it, he didn’t care that I saw it. I think I found it rather silly back then, and something tells me I’d now find it as laughable as the pool sex scene in “Showgirls”.

Of course, this SEX thing happened in the same week where I took ds to his first movie in the theater. He’s seen movies before, at home, but this was the first time I was taking him outside of our four walls in order to catch a flick. He was excited about the prospect of seeing “Planes” (TALKING CARS AND TALKING PLANES, MOMMY!!!), so I took both of the kids for a show. While he was fine during the movie, I wasn’t even sure that he would make it that far: he lost his nut during the trailers. The very first trailer was for “Free Birds”, an animated feature about a pair of turkeys that try to go back in time to the very first Thanksgiving to get turkey taken “off the menu”.

There’s a scene in the trailer where the more militant turkey (voiced by Woody Harrelson) is squaring off against the happy-go-lucky turkey pardoned by the President for Thanksgiving (voiced by Owen Wilson). When Wilson’s turkey draws a line in the dirt and says not to cross it, Harrelson’s turkey slaps him. Repeatedly. It’s a funny scene, for adults, and dd seemed to enjoy it. DS saw the first slap and IMMEDIATELY turned on the waterworks. He just lost it completely.

I pulled him onto my seat and immediately started cuddling with him, kissing him, stroking his hair, and generally trying all of the tricks that one uses when trying to calm your child. I was really grateful that we were in a fairly empty matinée attended only by people with similarly-aged children; I’m sure that the other parents heard ds and thought, “There but for the grace of God go I…”, much as I do whenever I’m the one with the well-behaved kid, hearing some other kid completely losing it.

And so this all makes me wonder: what age IS the right age to introduce these things? Cartoonish violence, like that of the “Free Bird” trailer, seems perfectly acceptable to me, but I was raised on “Looney Tunes” cartoons. ACME anvils, Wile E. Coyote’s thousand-foot drops into canyons, and point-blank rifle explosions into Elmer Fudd’s face were the norm. None of it was considered real. Wait 15 minutes, and another cartoon will come on showing the same character, back exactly as they were before whatever befell them in the prior cartoon. As much as I love “Marvel’s The Avengers”, I’m absolutely not ready to show that to my kids because the violence is way too much. And the profanity and references to sex in “Pitch Perfect” went blissfully high over dd’s head (or were edited out/explained by me, so as to gloss over them).

Given the dearth of G-rated films in the movie houses these days, I feel like I’m backed into a corner to either live on a steady diet of DVDs or take them to/show them movies that are in the PG range…and ds’ sensitivity may preclude a lot of his viewings. Trying to get a sense of whether it was just that movie or all violence in general, I did play about an hour of “Looney Tunes” for the kids this past weekend, and both kids saw Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Gossamer and Marvin the Martian in some of their most famous pieces. Both laughed. There was no crying whatsoever.

So, maybe it was just that trailer. Or, maybe it was that ds was extra-sensitive from being hungry, since he hadn’t yet really plowed into his food at that point. Or, maybe still, part of what we need to do – much as my dad did for me with that lukewarm sex scene in “No Way Out” – is pick what we think is good enough for acclimating them to the stuff gradually, so they will eventually make their way to the harder stuff they’ll really want to see in later years. I can’t figure what the perfect approach is, but for now I’ll just labor under the impression that letting them pick the pace at which they “progress” up the ratings scale will probably work far better…and just help them along the way as I can. Honestly, I’m not sure what else I can – or should – do, when faced with so few new feature options that are free of sex and violence.

And yes, I know that Bambi’s mother got shot in, like, the first 10 minutes of that movie, and Scar is a scary lion, and Maleficent is a scary witch and…OMG NOTHING IS SAFE. Oh just forget it. I think I’ll just put “CARS” on repeat. Don’t mind me.