Many people find the idea of planning a child’s birthday party simply terrifying. That does not have to be the case, though. Planning a child’s party can be a lot of fun if you follow these five tips to birthday party planning.
Five Ways to Make Planning a Child’s Birthday Party Fun
1. Get your child involved
The party must be something of interest to your child. Older children can really do a bulk of the planning with just some guidance from you. Obviously a younger child is going to need more help. You’ll want to offer a few different choices to a young child that you think might be of interest to him (or her).
It will go so much easier if you keep your child involved and do the things he asks for and is interested in. After all, it is a party for your child, so you want to be sure it’s exactly what he wants.
2. Have a guest list
It’s important to know who you have invited. Keep it handy because once those invites go out and RSVPs begin coming in you’ll want to know exactly who is coming and who is not. Decide in advance what’s the most you’re willing to have attend the party. For example, you can limit the number of friends to how many years old your child will be – if he’s turning 5 he can invite 5 friends.
Do be careful of school rules about inviting the whole class. If that’s the schools policy and you can’t or don’t want to entertain an entire class of Kindergartners, then find an alternate way to get the invites out to friends outside of school.
3. Plan a menu
This will help you in deciding the time of the party for your invites. Are you thinking just cake and ice cream? Then you don’t want to do the party at noon and not be serving lunch. So know what food you think you would like to serve. As it gets closer to the party you can solidify everything, but you’ll already have a menu in mind well in advance of the party.
4. Don’t forget the invites
You can either get cards already made or create your own. You want these to go out two weeks before the date of the party. Make sure to include all pertinent information: The date and time of the party (an end time is great, remember the younger the guests, the shorter you should make the party), location of the party, who it’s for, who to RSVP to.
Giving your invitees a date to RSVP by can also be helpful in your planning. Two days before the party gives you enough time to do last-minute shopping and call any stragglers that might have forgotten to call or misplaced their invite.
5. Plan activities
It’s always good to have extra activities planned. Sometimes kids can blow through one activity faster than you anticipated, so always have a bag of tricks up your sleeve to keep everyone entertained and things moving. For a two-hour long party between cake, ice cream, and presents, having three games planned and one back-up game is a good idea.
You might find you don’t even get pass two games because the kids enjoy one so much, or you might find you have jumped through all of your activities. It’s important to keep things moving, though, and before you know it parents will be coming to pick up your kids and you’ll be forgetting to hand out the goody bags you made. You’ll really be wondering where the time went because you had so much fun yourself.
So what do you think? Are you ready to throw a child’s birthday party now?
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