Retro Kiddie Birthday Bash

One day when my three children and their friends tell their children what kinds of birthday parties they had or the kinds they had attended in their childhood, I do NOT want to be remembered as the mom who threw a bad one, nor do I want to be NOT remembered at all.

My twin daughters, Tatiana and Angelica, recently celebrated their ninth birthday and I was up to the challenge of planning and executing a good birthday party they wouldn't soon forget. In an age when the cost of birthday parties have skyrocketed through the roof, sometimes totaling close to a thousand dollars when all is said and done, many schoolchildren have morphed into social butterflies and are very familiar with the term, "Been there, done that."

I can rattle off the myriad birthday parties my kids have attended, including their own, in their collective twenty-one years of party-going. There have been the basketball parties, the Zumba parties, the pottery parties, the Build-a-Bear parties, the mani-pedi and up-do parties, the make-your-own-pizza parties, the swim parties, the ice skating parties, the bowling parties, the Jenkinson's Boardwalk and Great Adventure parties, the slumber parties, and the the learn about fish and mammals at the NY Aquarium parties.

Then there were the Hibachi with fire and flying cutlery parties, the laser tag parties, the jewelry parties, the dinner and a movie parties, the Staten Island Zoo parties (my personal favorites), the Staten Island Children's Museum parties (my other favorites), the ubiquitous jungle gym/rock climbing parties, and of course my twins' personal all-time favorite: getting picked up in a pink stretch limousine, make-over and rock-music, runway fashion show party, replete with feather boas and a take-home video of the extravagant day's events.

Each of these parties were more interesting, creative and more looked-forwarded to than the last and my twins are just in the fourth grade. Because they've basically had the same core circle of friends since kindergarten, my quest to make a party that was fun and not done before was a tall order. And there are no harsher critics than pre-teen young ladies, so I proceeded carefully.

I thought long and hard, while driving, while waiting for patients to get numb, while cooking dinner. Then it hit me. I'd give the twins the kind of birthday party that I still remember fondly from my own childhood, now that I'm *ahem* thirty-nine years old: a REGULAR birthday party! How perfectly novel!

Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to invite their closest friends and treat them for a few hours to a birthday party, one without the extravagant bells and whistles, without the technology or fancy destinations, without the stale pizza and "keeping up with the Joneses" anxiety-riddled mentality? Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But at this point, we had come full party circle.

My twin daughters celebrated their ninth birthday with a good, old-fashioned birthday party. Fifteen of their closest girlfriends from their class and sports teams were welcomed to our home, where there were presented with bead necklaces, party hats and noise makers... and two hundred cupcakes. That's right, two hundred. And yes, I was quite busy the night before. They promptly rolled up their sleeves and decorated them with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry frosting, sprinkles, sugar flowers, cookie crumbles and M+M's. Did I mention the whipped cream, jelly beans and pretzels?

They had to be pried away from their dessert creations so as to be directed to the next activity: the very underrated game of... hold onto to your retro hats... pin the tail on the donkey! Each of my daughters' guests giggled with delight upon removing her blindfold and discovering where her tail had landed. Certainly every part of the donkey imaginable was covered with tail stickers (we were afraid homeowner's insurance wouldn't cover pins) and everyone was in fits of laughter at each turn. Their requests for another round were denied. There was no time, for next on the agenda was... freeze dance and limbo!

My twelve-year-old, Charista, was the disc jockey as the Lilliputian party crew immediately delved into groovy mode, demonstrating some most impressive and elaborate dance moves, including Meaghan, who was temporarily on crutches from a soccer injury. The sheer, joyful sounds of dancing, clapping and jumping were none that I'd heard for a very long time at my children's birthday parties past. It was music to my ears.

Dance winners even received prizes: an "Eight Ball," the fortune-telling black orb, and an Etch-a-Sketch, both so popular in the late seventies; Kerbanger toys and Pop Rock candies, also throw-backs from when I was in the fourth grade at Sacred Heart School; and battery-free microphone toys, because who doesn't want to go home and sing in front of the mirror and pretend she is a rock star?

The children's pleas for more freeze dancing was answered with a couple of games of musical chairs and a few rounds of "hot potato," the latter so nerve-wracking that towards the end you could cut the competitive tension with a knife, but each game invariably followed with fits of laughter. Even the girls who tired of participating retired to our family room and opted to play not with the Wii or XBox. Rather, two or three of them chose to play with the dollhouse. No batteries, no online gaming. Just imaginations. Their sheer enjoyment, especially my twins daughters', caught my eye and warmed the cockles of my heart.

Tatiana and Angelica blew out the birthday candles on their Egger's ice cream cake, smiling ear to ear, exhausted from the fun. It was then time for what they told me was their favorite part: presenting each of their friends with giant goody bags, each of which they had painstakingly shopped for and assembled the night before with their favorite candies and toys.

"After all Mommy," they said to me, "the goody bag is the best part of a party and a good goody bag shows that you care about your friends because they can go home with it and play with the stuff inside and have even more fun, and they always will remember your party and the good time they had."

And with that, and the few "Thanks for the best party ever" proclamations that I overheard some of the little girls saying as they gathered their coats and beautifully decorated cupcakes when their parents arrived to take them home that evening, I knew the shindig was a success.

Alas, what was old was new again and I had given my kids memories they will hopefully treasure when they're grown, not unlike the treasured memories my mother and father had given me so many years ago. And that's what life is all about.

Plus, there were leftover cupcakes.