Kids grow up fast, and each of their years is marked with a birthday. With each birthday, according to modern tradition, comes a birthday party.
Usually that means a big bash at a professional party venue that provides decorations, activities, kid-friendly fare, cake and party favors, for a base price of about $200 or $300.
For some parents, though, those kinds of parties are too expensive or just too generic.
E.W. Swan of Little Rock grew up with low-key birthday celebrations. The 44-year-old says that was the norm at the time.
“My theory is that your typical birthday party - like your typical house and your typical vehicle - has succumbed to ‘Bigger, badder, better, more!’ syndrome,” Swan says.
“When I was a kid, I think the most extravagant outing I had was around ’77 or ’78, when I got to take a few friends to Skate Ranch and have my party there. Nowadays kids are inviting their entire classes out to Jump Zone or the Arkansas Skatium or Playtime Pizza or Professor Bowl or whatever.
Not that there’s anything wrong with these places, but it doesn’t really feel like a birthday party so much as a field trip. Oh, and the gifts. Enormous piles of gifts mostly purchased by parents with no clue about what the birthday boy/girl actually likes, likely to be consigned to the Box of Misfit Toys and forgotten within hours.”
Swan kicked the trend this year and last by letting his son, 7-year-old Daniel, invite a few friends over for cake and ice cream, play video games and whack a pinata. And the invitation specified “no gifts.”
GETTING PERSONAL
Robyn Friday of Little Rock thinks the parties held at professional venues can be impersonal.
“They’re fun, but there are only so many places you can have a party and when they’re over I can’t remember Caitlin’s party from Hannah’s party … there’s just really nothing individual about them.”
Friday subscribes to a creative-is-better theory when it comes to birthday parties for her daughter, Stella, now 7.
“Birthdays have always been a really big deal to me,” Friday says. “I try to make her parties unique.”
Stella’s fourth birthday party was something out of a fairy tale.
“She was obsessed with princesses,” Friday says.
“She wore her little fairy princess T-shirt every day, and she’s always been obsessed with horses. So we decided to have a princess party for her, and every little girl in her preschool class came.”
Each little girl arrived in pretty princess attire and dined on princess-themed party food, including a homemade cake and homemade ice cream.
Friday designed the invitations, which featured a carriage, but didn’t give away the big surprise - a real horse drawn carriage that pulled up in front of the Friday’s house to take them all for a ride through Stella’s neighborhood near downtown Little Rock.
“I really like to have that ‘wow’ factor, that one thing that will really make a memory,” Friday says.
Stella’s seventh birthday was marked by a surprise trip for her and a bunch of her friends to “Camp Stella.” A hand-painted sign in front of the family’s home directed guests to the Fridays’ backyard, where they found pastel-colored tepees Friday had crafted out of scrap fabrics and festooned with homemade garlands of pompoms and paint chip cards from home supply stores. There were quilts and pillows strewn across the lawn, inviting lounging while munching on popcorn and hot dogs on sliced dinner rolls and watching movies projected onto a hanging sheet.
PLENTY OF PARTIES
Birthday invitations are plentiful for most school-age kids, sometimes coming two or three for one date. Stella has been to parties at friends’ homes but Friday says precious few have been do-it-yourself shindigs.
“I think it’s just a personality type. There are a lot of people who just don’t have time,” Friday says of her party style preference.
And then there’s the peer pressure. Stella succumbed as she was turning 5.
“No one else that she knew had had birthday parties at home and I think she was starting to feel like everybody else got to go to Jump!Zone and sit in a big chair and wear a crown and she kind of felt left out, I think,” Friday says. “We argued about it and I finally decided that if we don’t do this she’s going to resent me.”
The next year, though, Stella wanted to go back to holding birthday parties at home.
Friday’s own mother always made her birthday cakes and she had friends over for cake and ice cream.
“It was nothing elaborate, but I always had my parties at home,” says the 37-year-old.
But while the parties she has planned for Stella have had more wow factor than the ones she had as a child, she estimates that she has spent about the same amount of money pulling them off that she might have spent for a typical package deal at a birthday party venue.
“We maybe saved a little on the tepee one because I used so many things I already had,” she says. “We did buy a movie projector, but now we use it throughout the year.”
IT’S THE SUGAR, SUGAR
Kyle Proctor of Cabot agrees that birthday parties have become status symbols of sorts.
“Birthday parties for many are a way for parents to express to others how much they love their kids. They love them not by sheer gifts, but events focused at trying to give their friends the best experience,” Proctor says. “When they are young, the kids’ experience is all about the mom, and I would lovingly include my wife. Do the kids really care or remember all the custom cupcakes and craft paper? No. They want sugar in various forms and they want toys in the 10- to 20-dollar range.”
Julissa Buchmann does plenty of shopping for such toys. Her two children were recently invited to four parties in one day.
“When you have parties, you like for people to come,” she says. “So we try to go as much as we can. But that time we were not able to make it to all of them.”
Buchmann loves the idea of do-it-yourself parties, but finds the reality of hosting them much less appealing.
“I make it too complicated,” she says. “I want everything to be perfect.”
Her younger son, Robert “Tico,” turned 6 in December, and the Buchmanns decided to grant his wish to have a party at their home. Buchmann hired a catering company and entertainment and paid for help in cleaning before the event.
Tico had a fabulous time playing with his friends, and she’s pretty sure the guests enjoyed the party, too. Her older son, Joseph, who just turned 9 and had a party at Shuffles & Ballet II, however, did not like having the younger guests rummaging through his belongings, and in the end the whole thing seemed like more work than fun to Buchmann.
“It was a disaster,” she says. “The house, after the party, looked like a tornado went through. We said that would be the last time.”
GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY
Kate Franks’ house was a good bit worse for wear at the end of her daughter’s most recent birthday party in early June.
Libby Franks’ 10th birthday party was inspired by the reality TV show Hell’s Kitchen.
Kate Franks turned over her kitchen to 12 girls, who donned white chef hats and personalized black and white striped aprons and chopped, sliced, diced, poured, mixed, stirred, grilled and baked their way through a menu that included chicken toes with Zaxby’s sauce, ranch dressing, chocolate cake, chocolate icing, macaroni and cheese, salad, grilled corn, cowboy cookies, root beer popsicles and homemade ice cream.
Franks has crafted parties for Libby and her brother, Thomas, 11, over the years with themes like mad science, Legos, laser tag, Blue Angels and polka dots.
“We work together on ideas. It’s always something they’re into at the time. We [plan] for about a month before the party,” Franks says. “They help come up with all the ideas. We had a fun jungle party for Thomas, too. They had a flashlight plastic animal hunt in the dark garage. My mother always had fun DIY parties for me and my siblings - it’s a family tradition. My cousin in Dallas has DIY parties for her son, too. Genetics, I guess.”
Friday worries that the day will come when Stella is no longer wowed by her creative birthday prowess and wants to move on to more common fetes.
“It makes me sad,” she says.
For now, Friday can keep using her imaginative muscle to make birthday wishes come true for Stella and, soon, for Stella’s little brother, 1-year-old Penn.
“I’m not sure what to do for him. I don’t know much about boys yet,” she laughs. “Maybe vintage trains? I guess it depends on what he likes.”
Family, Pages 34 on 06/26/2013