Margaret's birthday party

Birthday parties for the toddler set can be pretty extravagant affairs. Some people rent out a "special" venue where the kids can run wild. Others hire some sort of performer to keep the kids entertained. Regardless of what people do, the events are always seem to be a serious amount of work for an hour or so of entertaining a bunch of toddlers/pre-school kids.

With that background, we set about planning Margaret's fourth birthday party a month or so ago. For prior birthdays, we've had family affairs, but for some reasons, Abby decided that we'd have a full-blown birthday party for Margaret this year. Which requires a number of decisions. Who do you invite? One possibility would be the party with a small number of select friends. Once we decided not to do this, we basically had to invite everyone. After all, if you're not being very selective, how can you not invite some kids from the preschool room at daycare? And you have to invite the neighborhood kids too.

Next, where do you hold the party? Initially, we thought about renting a local playroom that specializes in this type of event. My personal view was that we should just hold it at the local park. The kids can run around and entertain themselves, and everyone will be happy. What's the point of renting out a place when the kids won't care anyway?

In the end, we invited everyone from the preschool room, plus neighborhood kids and family friends, and held the party at a local park. We ended up with 25-30 kids, all of whom had a grand time running around, checking out bugs, and generally playing in the park. We got way too much food, but everyone seemed to enjoy the cake. And everyone seemed to have fun.

So I'd consider the party to be a success. We probably won't do this again in the future. Unless we do the small party with far fewer attendees. I know that Margaret had fun, but like anything with kids, it's not clear that she had more fun than she would have had with a party that required less work on our part. And that's what I'm looking for - something that makes the kids happy without much work. (I told a pregnant friend at work: "In all likelihood, anything that you think is cool, neat or useful about toys or other stuff for your kid, your kid won't care about." Words of wisdom, I think.)

The main purpose of this post is the pictures. Abby has been bugging me to post pictures from the birthday party, and when I said, "But they aren't any good," she said, "I don't care. I want those pictures." So here they are. All of them.

The Sports Guy

First, the source of the above pictures. This past weekend, we travelled to see the Philadelphia cousins where we went to a Japanese bbq place that we had previously visited for Cousin Andrew's birthday. The cousin's parents went to a baseball game, so it was five kids, Abby, me, and a friend who was in town. (She was in town for a race that she was running with Abby and Rachel on Sunday morning.) The kids didn't have us severely outnumbered, but dinner at the restaurant was still a chaotic event. Our chef put on a pretty good show including the standard trick of throwing shrimp for people to catch. That's what Teddy is doing, or trying to do, in these pictures.

Teddy likes to catch things. More generally, he's a big sports fan. He basically likes every sport out there. Hockey: has no idea what's going on, but is fine sitting there and watching a game. Same with American football. Basketball he loves, especially if it involves Georgetown. And he has a somewhat better idea what's actually happening in a basketball game. Same with soccer.

But I think that he really loves baseball. I'm not sure why. In fact, I'm not sure why he likes sports at all. But he can actually sit for an amazing amount of time to watch a baseball game. Neither his mama nor his papa are particularly good at sports. And at this point in my life, I have little patience as a spectator of the vast majority of sporting events, especially baseball (which takes a god-awful amount of time to play a game) or football (which involves too much silly stuff with big fat guys falling down). Nowadays, I tend to like futbol or, I suppose, hockey, both of which involve lots of continuous action in a relatively compressed time frame.

Teddy, in contrast, wants to play baseball. He wears his little Cubs hat, has his little mitt, and especially likes to swing his little bat at "pitches" thrown at him. When he then throws the ball, he has this little wind-up that he must have learned from watching games on TV. It would appear that he's a submariner because when he tosses the ball, he tends to do so in an side-arm fashion. And it's not clear that he knows on which hand his mitt belongs - when I say, "Wrong hand, Teddy," he'll immediately concur, "Yeah, wrong hand" and will switch his mitt to the correct hand. But he almost always starts with his mitt on the wrong hand.

Speaking of the "wrong hand" for his mitt, it could be that he's left-handed. Like his sister. She is so clearly left-handed that there's no point in even discussing it at this point. She's interested in sports as well, but not nearly with the same intensity. Instead, she seems to be more of a "casual" sports fan like her mama and papa. I'm not sure if Teddy's interest reflects a gender effect or something else. But I do hope that he's not disappointed with his future athletic career. Given the athletic skill that he has gotten from his genetic background - on both sides - I fear that he will be.