1st Birthday Parties

My daughters Last 3 birthdays were very small just immediate family stopped by and brought gifts and her 3rd b-day just my mom, step-dad, and little sister stopped over. Novalee wont be much different. My brothers and sisters are not talking to me at the moment.
So Novalee's birthday won't be much different and her dads side of the family care more about his sister's kids than his. So they will not be attending. So very small birthday's. But the daycare lady does something with all the other kids like cupcakes and stuff which is nice. I feel bad for them but nobody cares to come if I did plan something big for them. Oh well there young and then a big party with school friends when they get older will mean so much more to them.

Since my son is the only child we have we have had pretty big parties. The only problem is we can not have the two families together which bothers me alot. I wish they would just get along and we could do one party.

My family likes to celebrate birthdays and since there are 3 birthdays in October we get together once for all 3 of them. That means that my Aunts and Uncles come but that is normally at my mom's house.

This last year when he turned 4 we had a party at Merrifield park and invited some of our friends and family over also. So it was nice to be able to have the kids playing at the playground.

But who knows what we will do in the future.

Mommy of Aaron

We have one child also but had a small party with the familly and friends. We will continue like this for couple years because the child memory yet it so short and probably wont remember anything and I just take a lot of pictures (my nature!) so it look like it was big. When people ask us what they should buy we always suggest to give money for his college later and last year he recieved more then 300usd and so far he as 1000 dollars between his b'day and Christmas and he's so happy to received just couple gifts. We will not tell him do (and the family aggred with us), he will have to earn that money later. I would not feel guilty about it if I where you; they dont know.

I guess part of the reason for the huge 1st birthday party was simply to get family and friends together, the other was because we'd just moved into our new house a few months prior.  I really don't want to prepare for a big party, but then again it's a good excuse to get STUFF done!  Something tells me once I start the invite list, it will be as big as Luke's...haha! 

This birthday will be a bit different anyway.  Luke's birthday is July and Shawn's is May.  But we have a family wedding in June, which my parents will fly up from FL for the wedding.  I may just do ONE gathering in June for BOTH kid's birthdays, then have cake and ice cream for family here for each kid around their birthdays.  I'm not going to make my parent's fly home 3 times over 4 months for birthday parties!  

Or maybe I'll just cancel birthdays this year and take nap instead :))

Jessica
~ Mommy to Luke and Shawn

The way I see it is that a lot of families only get a chance to see the baby when it is first born or at Christmas, but they don't get to see everything that happened in the first year. There are such huge changes in that first year and it is important to get everyone together to celebrate baby's success list! Never again will they have such a long list of major accomplishments in one year... was born, learned to hold head up, slept through the night, sat up, rolled over, ate solid foods and tried tons of new ones, crawled, stood up, walked etc.

I admit though that we invited just a few more people for my older son's first birthday, but we still had lots for my younger son's party too.

We had a huge party for my daughters first birthday and it was completly overwhelming for her and I. Most of the friends and family didn't get much one on one time for you and how do you plan party games for a one year old? There were a lot of other kids there and I never considered having activities for them because Madison wasn't really old enough to play games. It was just too much I think just a few of close family members and friends benefits everyone involved.

We had cookouts for both of my daughters first birthdays. Since my husband is the youngest of six kids and both of his parents are remarried they were bigger than your average cookout! We invited both of our families and close friends and it was alot of fun. With so many cousins we barely even saw our kids! After the first birthday party we just had small cookouts until my oldest was old enough to start preschool and make a few friends. Thats when we stopped doing the family thing and started letting her invite a few friends for little get togethers. I think we'll probably do the same for Renae.

Amanda
~Mommy to Cara and Renae~