Friday night we had Nicholas' birthday party with his friends. There were 15 kids, including my own, at my house, and several parents wondered aloud about my sanity as they dropped their child off, and then ran away before I roped them into helping. Haha. No, actually, it wasn't at all bad. I had prepared myself for much, much worse. At a birthday party for another child in the class two days earlier, there were incidents of actual fistfights. But although many of the boys were the same, we also had the additional calming influence of three girls, and I seriously think that kept the boys on their best behavior. Yes, they are still kind of young, but they are old enough to sometimes care what the girls might think.
I let the kids make their own pizzas, which was a really clever way of cutting down on the actual work I had to do. I let my Kitchenaid mix up my dough, then Noah and I separated it into individual portions. The kids rolled it out, put on the sauce, added whatever toppings they wanted, and I just had to pop it in the oven and make sure it didn't burn. Not all the kids arrived at the same time, so I also didn't have to figure out how to bake 15 pizzas at once in my not-much-bigger-than-an-easy-bake-oven oven. That worked out nicely.
When they were all stuffed with pepperoni, we had a vote off for which movie they wanted to see. I had rented a few good ones from the library, plus we have a rather extensive collection of our own. 5 wanted to see "Night at the Museum" while 6 wanted to see "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". All the Harry Potter movies were taken out of the running since one child isn't allowed to watch them. Also, the movies had to be able to be seen in German, since most of the kids didn't speak enough English to understand what was going on. We did turn on the English subtitles since a couple of the kids weren't sure they spoke enough German to understand what was going on, either. The girls ended up wandering away from the movie and playing with Sarah and Sophie, until it was time for them to go to sleep. Then they played their own game upstairs until I stopped the movie and called everyone down for ice cream sundaes.
I had thought about making popcorn, but decided that I didn't want to deal with the resulting mess that would cause. Plus, I didn't think they would be able to eat it after all that pizza. But I did have all the fixings for some awesome banana splits. They seemed to enjoy those, and there were much less leftovers from that than the pizza. haha. The girls went home after that, while the boys changed in to their pyjamas, brushed their teeth and then watched the rest of the movie.
I was really proud of Nicholas for letting the boys assemble all the new Lego toys they gave him. He didn't have a problem sharing at all. (Does this mean he's finally starting to mature?) At 10:45 it was final lights out, and they went to sleep pretty quickly. I figured there was no sense in trying to make them go to bed much earlier than that. They would have just stayed awake, perhaps getting into mischief if I had suggested it much earlier. I slept upstairs just in case there were any "incidents" in the night, but I didn't hear a peep out of them til morning. After breakfast they all cleaned up their stuff and were slowly picked up by their parents. Nick seemed to have a great time, and so did the guests. It was most definitely the easiest birthday party of the summer.
Sadly, our present to Nicholas STILL has not arrived, grrr Amazon. But we are hopeful it will get here before his next birthday. I took a nice long nap Saturday afternoon and we put the kids to bed a bit earlier than usual, since they had all been up late the night before. I wondered how all the other parents fared?
Some things that stood out to me during this party; 1) I am so glad we have a big couch, so everyone could sit comfortably while watching the movie, 2) there were 11 kids eating breakfast around our table Saturday morning, and everyone had elbow room, 3) the play area upstairs makes a great slumber party venue, and I will definitely need to use it more in the future. We have many blessings and are grateful for them all.