I’ve always been wildly optimistic about what I can achieve in a certain timeframe, which is my daily to-do list always has 58 bullet points and I spent my first year in London convinced I could get anywhere on the tube map in half an hour. In a similarly buoyant fashion, I’ve signed up to just about every vaguely interesting-sounding newsletter there is, and have no clue which day of the week they’re meant to land in my inbox, or if indeed there is a regular day.
With this in mind, I’m hoping no one will have noticed that I completely failed to send my newsletter last Friday. It’s poor form just a few weeks after launching, but in my defence, I was very busy having a nervous breakdown trying to plan my three-year-old’s birthday party, fighting off an ever-lasting chest infection and wrapping up work stuff pre-Christmas holidays. I always laugh when people write posts on social media saying “Guys, I’m so sorry I haven’t been on here much for the past few days” – as if anyone cares! – so I’m sure it’s a forgivable offence.
Back to the third birthday party and it went well, thank god. I’m living up to tough standards, because the South London toddler party scene is completely mental. I sort of assumed no one bothered with birthday parties for three-year-olds – when I asked my mum how we celebrated mine she sort of shrugged and said “Dad was always away for your actual birthdays so we just had a cake when he was around”. I do have a distinct and gorgeous memory of spending my younger sister’s third birthday sitting on a rug in my grandmother’s sunny back garden, hearing tales of Winston Churchill while little Penny fell face-first into a homemade sponge cake. We thought the plain, round cake was flipping amazing because it had three little teddy bear candles on top – nowadays parents bring cakes to nursery that look as if they’ve been sculpted at the Royal College of Art, and probably cost the same. My husband and I nearly died of shock when we discovered that a bog-standard dinosaur cake costs FORTY-FIVE QUID from Waitrose.
Obviously I could have chosen to step away from all this madness, but the problem is my daughter is completely obsessed with birthday parties. She treats each party bag as if it’s a diamond-encrusted Hermès Birkin, to be carefully collected and treasured forever (we now have quite a sizeable collection). She will randomly pipe up with party memories for weeks after each event, chatting merrily about “Beffaney’s party” or “Charlie’s enormous big cake”. Even my cold, hard heart couldn’t help but respond to her joy, and so I simply had to throw her a magical, memorable birthday party of her own. Plus, it’s payback for the many invites she’s received.
Naturally, I didn’t learn at all from my wedding in 2017, when I spurned the eminently sensible idea of hiring a nice wedding venue with a brochure full of options and having everything sorted out for you, and instead chose to “put my own stamp” on a rural barn. An event planner, I am not – I find making loads of decisions really stressful, particularly when there’s loads of money involved and I have no clue what I’m doing.
Actually, I did enquire about hiring a soft play centre locally, and discovered that it would cost £25 per tiny head (plus an enormous coffee tab for all the parents’ oat flat whites). By my calculations we’d be looking at around £800 for an hour and a half-long birthday party, which is basically My Super Sweet 16 territory. See what I mean about the party thing being crazy round here?!
The one thing I did do this time round (and failed to do for my wedding) was to make quick decisions. Seriously, unless you’re making a hugely important life-changing commitment, don’t agonise over anything, just make a choice, pay invoices straight away and get on with it. If you are someone who tends to dilly-dally and wrestle with decisions a lot like me then I really recommend this gung-ho approach - the amount of time saved by not dithering is totally worth risking an ‘imperfect’ decision (which doesn’t actually exist, because as soon as you’ve made a call and paid you just forget about the other options).
So I booked the cheapest hall I could find (£80 an hour, LOL), Googled ‘kids entertainer’, then clicked on the first result that came up, requesting a combined ‘Princess and dinosaur’ theme on their booking form. ‘We’ve never done one of those before, but it sounds exciting!’ comes the response. I made a list of food and marched round Sainsbury’s throwing things into my trolley, ordered decorations, party bags and so on online, and got a genius designer friend at work to create an invite (the main perks of working in magazines are free moisturiser, the odd PR breakfast at Dishoom and impressively-designed party invites).
At one point I did go completely mad and bought a 75-strong balloon arch because I was worried that the hall would look too empty. I still have a blister on my thumb from frantically pumping up the balloons, and it took my husband and I four episodes of Motherland to get the damn arch together, by which point it took up the entire length of our flat. In fact the arch was too big to be transported by car, so instead I assigned some reluctant family members to parade it across the Common to the venue, while I ran round putting chairs out and throwing confetti onto a trestle table.
Fair to say, it did not look like the perfect Instagram dream. But it was so much fun! My family were amazing, running round with coffees and mulled wine for the parents. The kids seemed very happy to either dance along with the ‘Princess’ entertainer and her dodgy American accent, or smash up the cardboard colour-in castle I’d bunged in the corner (best £20 I have ever spent). I didn’t even mind that only one-tenth of the 72 sandwiches I’d made actually got eaten, or that at the end of the party, while I was carrying my daughter, one of the nursery dads made polite conversation by asking me what her name was. Or that all the cards and presents got completely mixed up, thereby saving me from having write thank you cards for each gift after third birthday parties (yes people do that at our nursery too).
Afterwards, I felt deeply satisifed. My daughter had a good time, I didn’t completely embarrass myself and most importantly, I must’ve secured enough return party invites not to have to entertain my own child for at least another six months. Win.
Genuinely really enjoyed this