8 Ways to Botch a Kid’s Birthday Party

Remember the Reginald Rose play Twelve Angry Men? Well, I’ve decided to write a new stage production called Twelve Spastic Kindergartners. It’s not about a murder-trial jury, but rather a roster of kids at a birthday party. A party during which the guests and 6-year-old host cause mayhem in a new house, the birthday boy gets away with murder, and somehow the parents are sentenced to three hours of floor scrubbing and permanent ringing in their ears. It’s full of more drama and intrigue than the original production, with the added action of dinosaur-mauling and kung-fu fighting.

I waited a long time to have a big enough home in which to throw great parties. For years we hosted shin-digs at playgrounds, karate studios, ice-skating rinks, and once even a horse stable. So now that I’ve finally done the house-party thing, well, now I realize that you need to be careful what you wish for. Everyone seemed to have a great time at my son’s dinosaur-themed bash, so I couldn’t quite figure out why, after the last of the guests had picked up their goody bags and headed home, I felt like climbing into bed and staying there until Labor Day.

After compiling this list of how I might have gone astray in my party planning, I now fully understand. So for your benefit, if you are considering hosting your child’s birthday blow-out at home, here are the eight things you can do to really mess things up for yourself. Read them and learn, people.

1. Make it a drop-off party (for kids under 8). I thought this would be the way to go, since 12 kids in the house are more manageable than two or three dozen kids, adults and siblings. And I figured some of these busy parents would appreciate a couple hours of free childcare. What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that the kid-to-adult ratio would be six-to-one, which means five more children for each adult to kick back into play when they make a beeline for the basement stairs or start chasing one another around the dining room table. What surprised me was how popular the drop-off concept was. While a couple of adults stuck around to schmooze, most had no problem leaving. In fact, a few deposited their kids at my door, ran back to their cars and drove off so fast, they practically left skid marks in my driveway. Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to relieve them of the stress evidenced by their summer-break-is-only-half-over-and-I’m-ready-to-hang-myself look. You know, the one you’ve seen in the mirror every morning since mid-June.

Some parents dropped off their kids so fast, they left skid marks.

2. Assume the big kids will be big helpers. Before the event, my 8-year-old daughter, a.k.a. Sister of the Birthday Boy, promised to help me out by supervising the party games and rounding up the little ones if they got too rowdy. Instead, she spent three hours composing “Girls Only—Boys Keep Out” signs for her bedroom door, complaining that the little kids had a one-minute head start in the dinosaur hunt, chasing her brother and his friends into the closet, and being a general pain in the ass. Why? Because it was her brother’s party and he was the center of attention and quite frankly, that just wasn’t sitting well with her.

3. Forget to give visiting relatives a mission. My mother, who is pretty shy, usually limits her partying activities to sitting on the couch with a plate of food on her lap. She always asks what she can do to help, but then either retreats or freaks out when things get crazy. This time she kicked it up a notch when one of the birthday guests, upon hearing his dad arrive to pick him up, ran upstairs and hid under one of the beds. My mother had been in the bathroom when this happened; she emerged just as the father, fully aware that his son was hiding from him, was engaged in a full-on manhunt. Without investigating the situation or helping to find the kid, Grandma came running down the stairs yelling, “A child is missing! One of the dads can’t find his child!,” of course setting everyone into unnecessary panic mode.

4. Assume the birthday boy is too mature for a mid-party meltdown. There’s a Berenstain Bears book called Too Much Birthday, and I should’ve reread it before planning the party. No matter how well the guest of honor slept the previous night, or how excited he’s been about the festivities, there will come a point during the party when he will will turn into the Evil Twin Birthday Boy. My son’s moment came when he asked if he could open his presents in front of his guests and I said no. He told me I was a mean mommy. He complained that the Darth Vader candle we had chosen for his cake wasn’t big enough. Then he ran upstairs and collapsed on the floor in the middle of his guests. Next year, buddy, it’ll be the four of us at Olive Garden. If you’re really lucky, we’ll bring along an Entenmann’s donut and stick a teeny, tiny candle in it.

5. Be unprepared for piñata pandemonium. You know how you put off watching Star Wars because it’s too violent, and how you remind your child to “just use his words” instead of clobbering someone when he’s angry? Well, you set yourself back a dozen chapters in the parenting book the second you hand your child a baseball bat and tell him to go medieval on a paper-mache dinosaur. Then, when the candy rainstorm comes, it’s frightening to witness 15 kids jump over and tackle each other to the ground in an effort to snag the most Tootsie Rolls. It’s more disgusting than watching a live studio audience have a conniption over free Uggs and BBQ grills during the “Oprah’s Favorite Things” giveaway. There are those innocent children, sucking on their sugary loot, while the dinosaur’s limbs dangle beneath his limp body. It’s barbaric. Perhaps if I had purchased the purple Barney piñata, I might not have felt so bad about the lynching.

6. Serve chocolate cake. Actually, you might want to rethink offering anything chocolate at a children’s party. After consuming just a small chocolate cupcake each, two kids who had previously appeared mellow went all bug-eyed and began running around the house like monkeys on PCP. In a scene worthy of Scarface, chocolate frosting got smeared into the carpet, on the walls, up the stairs and all over the kids. A Kung Fu fight erupted, and the ceiling shook as if it were going to crash down into the dining room table. It got so crazy that I was waiting for Long Duck Dong to peek out from behind the chandelier. Yep, a lightweight, spongey, otherwise innocuous Angel Food cake would’ve been the way to go.

7. Diversify the goody bags. I’m dead-serious when I say that if you dispense Jolly Ranchers, make sure they are all the exact same color and flavor. Because if one kid gets a dark-blue candy and another gets a light-blue one, all hell will break loose when you distribute the goody bags. This is not the time for personalization. Children are highly competitive, filthy little conformists and don’t you forget it.

Children are filthy little conformists and don’t you forget it.

8. Run out of bathroom disinfectant. What do you get when you put a slew of kindergarten-age boys in one house and hand them juice boxes? A bathroom floor, toilet and walls covered in pee, that’s what. Before the party, do yourself a favor and stock up on Lysol and other products your earth-conscious friends would normally not approve of. Believe me, if they saw the yellow-stained walls, they would approve. Just this once.

I briefly considered adding a ninth rule to break, and it would’ve been the one about adult alcohol consumption. Originally I figured it wouldn’t be tasteful to offer wine to the parents who stayed to help. After all, it was daytime and there were children under our care. But in retrospect, a little glass of chardonnay would’ve taken the edge off. Besides, those trooper parents deserved it just for sticking around. For those I now call my most special friends, I owe you big time. Come back Saturday night for an adults-only party, because there’s a bottle of vino with your name on it.

This column originally appeared in the Lady and a Red Typewriter blog, 2011.