Wednesday, July 14th, we celebrated Sarah’s birthday at school and with her friends. Having a summer birthday in the States is no big deal. Everyone is still usually around, since summer vacation is so long, and I don’t remember there ever being a problem having my friends there to celebrate with me. In Switzerland, however, it’s a different story. Vacation is king, and when you only get 5 weeks to enjoy summer, they use every second they can, often taking off Friday after school is out, and staying gone the whole time. Since Sarah’s birthday is in the first week of vacation, her friends are never available then, so she has decided to celebrate early, rather than risk having them not be able to come at all. Such a sensible girl. 🙂
In the morning, I brought birthday treats to school to share during long recess/snack time. Sarah requested fruit kebabs, and I had found these really cute bamboo skewers that were just perfect. They weren’t too long, they had a good thick handle on them, and they were pretty! I loaded them up with red and green grapes, strawberries, watermelon, and cantalope; all fruit I knew Sarah liked. Some of the boys in her class were a bit disappointed there weren’t any brownies to go along with the fruit. Sorry boys! But the girls hovered around me, eating one kebab after another. Good thing I made so many extra. When break time was over, I hurried back home to get everything ready for her horse party that afternoon.
I love birthday parties. I love picking a theme with the birthday kid, and deciding what games and stuff would go well with that theme. Thanks to birthdaypartyideas.com, we found some great horse themed games, and thanks to my plentiful supply of pretty paper and punches, we had really cute invites and treat bags. Sarah is 9 now, so we decided on an all-girl party. And since there are only 9 girls total in her class, we invited all of them, plus Sophie. 🙂 Everyone was able to make it, which was especially nice, and I was pleased to see how nicely they all played together.
Since it was such a nice day, we played most of the games outside on the communal lawn of our apartment building. I happened to have some metal buckets in my craft room, that are used for storage. So I emptied those out and used them to play a game, then put them on the cake table as decoration.
The girls thought it was hilarious when I showed them how to ride the cockhorse to the bucket of sugar cubes, and then they all wanted to eat a sugar cube themselves. Fortunately, most of them showed some sense and spit it out after just a while, because it was “too sweet”. Yeah, pure sugar tends to do that. 🙂
Then I had them toss some water balloons around, trying to get the horse flies off each other. (There weren’t really flies, but it was hot, and water sounded like a good idea.) I had them bring their bathing suits, and they loved getting wet, but it wasn’t enough. Our neighbor saw us out there, and brought out her hose and sprinkler so the girls could run through it. Perfect! Thanks, Maya!
They must have done that for a good 30 minutes, until they finally started to get a bit cold, and wanted to dry off and come inside. We played some more games, then opened presents.
I am always so happy that my children are genuinely pleased with anything they receive as a present. Makes giving them things much more pleasurable.
The thing I was most proud about was the cake.
1) It actually looked like a horse, and 2) the Swiss kids actually ate it! I got smart and instead of frosting with buttercream frosting like normal, I melted some dark chocolate and poured it over the cake like a ganache. Then I used a bit of buttercream to add the details. The kids loved it and almost everyone cleared their plate.
Unfortunately, chocolate ganache doesn’t go with every birthday cake idea, but at least this once, it did. When everyone was through eating cake, they played with all of Sarah’s new toys until it was time to go home. A relatively stress free party for me, and the kids all had a good time. Most importantly, Sarah loved her party. Whew!