Jul
07
Planning a great kids' birthday parties on a budget:
1. Have a separate celebration at school. Ask your child’s teacher if you can bake some cupcakes and bring them to school. That way, you can avoid having to host a large, expensive party at home.
2. Invite a few friends. If your child wants to have a few close pals over for some celebrating, arrange a playdate/mini-party. Ask him to limit the number of kids to a small group -- say 4 or 5 -- and take them out to a movie or for pizza.
3. Design and create your own birthday invitations for the party. Making a personalized birthday invitation is a fun opportunity for your child to express her creativity and is a great way to save money.
4. Make your own decorations. There's nothing as wonderful as kids' art to use as decoration at birthday parties. Help your child cut some construction paper into interesting shapes. Get some glitter and glue and make drawings to post around to accent crepe paper and balloons. Make origami cranes and flowers out of colorful paper (it’s not as hard as it looks!).
5. Make your own fun. Put on some music and have a freeze-dance or limbo contest in the living room. If the weather’s nice, set up badminton net in the back yard or have an obstacle-course party. One mom and dad I know organized a museum scavenger hunt for their 7-year-old and his friends. Another couple hosted a cardboard-house building contest in their back yard.
6. Get creative with food. Sure, there's the old birthday party standard food -- pizza. But if you wanna offer some other choices without spending a lot, consider cutting turkey and cheese sandwiches into fun shapes with cookie cutters. You can also set up a cookie-decorating station.
7. Have a backup plan at birthday parties. If you’re planning a celebration around an activity in your house, such as a treasure hunt or movie, be sure to have something else ready to go. Grade-schoolers' attention spans usually won't last through a 90-minute movie. If they finish an activity or get bored, you will definitely want to have another activity ready or you'll run the risk of having kids run amok through your house, chasing each other and wreaking general mayhem (unless that's okay by you, in which case, let 'em loose!).
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