Letitia's Princess Party

When organising a birthday party for a 5 yo girl:
1) Make sure that your B'day daughter is not 45mins late for the party. This way she gets to play more of the games designed for her.
2) Have more than 1 more person (other than your spouse) to help out.
3) Forget about catering for everyone's gourmet taste (healthy food), it'll get wasted.
4) Plan for extra "surprise" guests (junk food and esp. toys).
5) Plan to stay back another couple of hours to clean up (with overtired and whingy kids)

This is one for the biggest event we've achieved on our own. As usual, anything well planned is sure to go wrong. This party was "missing" a birthday girl for about 45 mins as our lovely neighbour who was suppose to drop her got the time wrong. **Our sincere apologies to our neighbour as she felt really bad about it but we still have to blog it. All's well anyway and we are indebted to her!!** Letitia did not know a thing but felt real "royal" when everyone was WAITING for her. She was just thrilled to finally get to her party. She didn't even know she missed out on a few games (we had to keep 20 kids occupied) and generally had a ball with all her friends.

We found that most of the finger food were wasted due to the heat but the chinese take-aways were very popular. We have learnt to stick to our own cuisine and have loads of it for next time and drop the "rabbit" stuff. Carrot and celery sticks were soon converted to "Wiggles vegetable soup" at home. We were blessed enough to have our PRATT family help with looking after Mathena (she needed someone to hang on to as it was overwhelming) and also to take heaps of pictures (which was great as I missed out on a lot of action). A lot of prep work were done 2 weeks prior and the day before. Even more were the cleaning up after. We had 2 girls from our church to "play" with the kids, up to 8 games and lots the running around. They had morning tea and lunch and a play with the play equipment on the park.

We were TIRED after and still recovering. We are happy that we pulled everything through with not much dramas ("I don't want to be your friend!") or tears. Letitia still have some friends in talking terms with her and we apologise profusely for "the look" when she ripped off the present's wrapping and found clothes/craft stuff instead of toys. We realised that our parenting skills were all "on show" at birthday parties and yes, we are VERY embarrassed.

Letitia has been drilled that the next party of this size is when she turns 10! I have 5 years of excuse left. The other ones will just be cake and family (and 1-2 friends). For the time being, just let me rest till the end of September when Ms No 2 ask for "Wiggles party".