Throw the SIMPLE Birthday Party

Hi, my name is Rachel and I am a Pinterest addict. I am guilty of spending hours upon hours scrolling and pinning projects that I have no real intention of ever completing (even though they are all SUPER SIMPLE and take fewer than thirty minutes). I have boards full of recipes, home-decor ideas (several of those, actually), favorite literature quotes, and diet/exercise tips. I have boards dedicated to Instagram-worthy fashion and accessories and boards devoted to elaborate hairstyles that I have never worn. But oddly enough, my boards that contain the most pins (and the ones that I have actually tried) are devoted to children’s birthday party ideas. For those, I am a complete sucker. 

I have been guilty of fully buying into the Pinterest-perfect birthday party mindset.

I can still remember planning my very first child’s party like it was yesterday. My son was about nine-months-old, and I was scouring the internet trying to figure out what a one-year-old’s party was supposed to look like. I discovered that we needed to have a cake to eat and a cake to smash (and possibly a third cake to smash during a professional photography session on a different date). I needed PAPER straws and tiny mason jars to drink from. I needed sandwiches shaped liked bears (easier said than done, folks), and I needed lots of burlap everywhere. I needed special shirts to indicate that I was the mommy and my husband was the daddy. I needed personalized party favors — something with my son’s photo on it or his monogram or something. I needed to string up lots of pom-poms and tissue poufs, and I needed a giant metallic mylar balloon shaped like the number 1 to remind everyone how old my son was turning.

In short, I needed everything to be perfect. 

But it wasn’t. I remember it being about three weeks before the party when I had a complete meltdown. It was a Saturday night, and I was cutting blue and green felt into triangles and stringing them with twine to make a series of pennant banners (I’d decided that pom-poms and poufs were out). I had charged my husband with drilling holes into the tops of the tiny mason jars so that we could slide the paper straws through without removing the lids. My husband walked in and showed me the mangled up lid after his failed attempt. He explained that his drill wasn’t really the right tool for this sort of thing. He asked (in the kind of slow, patient voice that you use to talk to a crazy person) if I was sure that all of this was really necessary for Jake’s party. 

Necessary? NECESSARY?!

“We’ll just have to get a different power tool!” I exclaimed, with a wild look in my eyes. “We NEED to go to Lowe’s and find the right tool! I bought an entire case of mason jars!”

Only in hindsight did I see how completely off-the-rails I had become. Only later (much later, because he values his life) did my husband approach me and question my motivation behind orchestrating the elaborate accessories and decor. “Are you doing it for Jake? Or are you doing it for you?” he asked, leaving me feeling angry, but also a bit abashed because he was right. In the end, Jake doesn’t care about the decor and theme of his party. Fast-forward to this year: he has just turned five, and his biggest concerns as I was planning the big event were which of his friends were coming and what they were going to do at the party. He certainly didn’t ask about my color scheme or my table accessories. He was more concerned about whether he would get any monster trucks as presents. 

Recently, we went to a little friend’s third birthday, and I realized with a shock about halfway through the party just how simple it was. There were no balloons. There was no “theme” (unless you count the Dinotrux figures that were placed on the grocery store cake at the moment before the lighting of the birthday candles). It was a very simple birthday at the playground, with cake and snacks under the pavilion. No tablecloths. No banner. Cans of La Croix and juice boxes instead of tiny mason jars with paper straws. The kids had a blast, and the adults did, too. It was a great time spent with family and friends, made no less sweet by the lack of Pinterest-perfect decor. It was a reminder that getting caught up in the extra details of planning a party is really missing the mark.

The heart of a birthday party should be celebrating another year of life with the people you love by doing something fun. There is nothing wrong with creating a beautiful event, but it becomes wrong when it becomes a crazy and stressful obsession. It becomes wrong when I am up late on a Saturday night crying about having the wrong power tool for the mason jars. It becomes wrong when I am so concerned about the banner falling down during the party that I miss my son laughing and playing with his friends and glancing at me to see if I’m watching. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still catch myself scrolling through Pinterest, looking at elaborate decorations and decadent birthday cakes with colorful drip frosting running down the side. A few weeks before his fifth birthday, I showed Jake a picture of a piñata cake that I’d found, with actual candy spilling out of the center of it. I wasn’t going to attempt to make it myself, of course. I was going to hire a professional. I had already started looking online at price quotes when it occurred to me to ask Jake, “What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?”

“I want chocolate. I want Mario and Luigi and BOWSER on my cake!” he said, overjoyed at the very thought of it. “Okay,” I said, deleting my entire Pinterest board for his fifth birthday. “You’ve got it.”