Growing up, my mom was the Queen of Birthdays and always made me feel like the most important person. My sweet Milo is turning five this month and I want to make him feel just as awesome. For his birthday party, he and a buddy are co-hosting their preschool classmates at a swimming pool.
Activities will be splashing and then bouncing around a decorated conference room while hopped-up on sugar. We created adorable custom Hallmark invitations and plates (thanks, sponsor!).
Because Milo’s party is shared — and not on his actual birthday — I want to go to extra lengths to make him feel like the King of the World on his big day. But how?
This is what I have so far: Birthday Boy can do any or all of the following:
- Choose the meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He has picked hamburgers and sweet potato fries.
- Pick the day’s activities. He doesn’t know that he’ll be getting a new bike or that Daddy wants to take him sledding. So, he might just pick build a LEGO city and comic book story.
- Eat a sundae as big as his head. Or share one with me, because he has a really big head.
Do you fill your dining room with balloons or a paper banner on your child’s birthday? I love hearing about all the special touches that other families do to make birthdays special days. Please tell me your birthday traditions and I will copy the easiest, best ones (please).
As part of a series sponsored by Hallmark, we’ll be posting monthly about our everyday life is a special occasion moments whether they are as universal as milestone birthdays or as personal as the start of daycare.
I copied Wendy’s streamers and took it to another level, making the number/age out of streamers on the door, hanging a fringe of them from several doorways, and finally dangling them from the ceiling in the dining room. It was a huge hit — the kids still talk about it five months later – and I’ll do it every year now. Some people do a streamer blockade on the bedroom door so they have to burst out, but in year one that could be totally spoiled by a room-sharing brother bursting through it. Here’s a visual of a streamed up doorway: http://wendolonia.com/blog/2011/08/31/a-hodgepodge-of-stuff/
I’m going to buy streamers TODAY!
My husband is a chef. He cooks the most gourmet version of pancakes every year for birthday breakfast. Fresh fruit, homemade syrup- it gets to be a bit ridiculous how good it is. We stick candles in the pancakes and sing “happy birthday”.
Thank you for sharing. My little one will be 1 in march. I know he is kinda young for this stuff but I plan on filling his crib with balloons. I love the idea of streamers and special meals. I can’t wait for him to be a big boy!
OK, well Whitney already told one of mine.
I like decorating in general for birthdays and I do it up the night before after the kids go to bed. In addition to the streamers, I try to have some balloons rolling around on the floor and I made a “Happy Birthday” banner that I hang up too.
I also bought a crazy birthday hat last year but the kids aren’t so keen on it. And I’d like to buy a special Happy Birthday plate for the birthday boy to use at meals, but I haven’t found one I like yet.
Oh also — sprinkles! I put sprinkles on everything that won’t be completely gross: cereal, toast, applesauce.
I like birthdays!
Because my mom is Swedish, our bday tradition when I was a kid involved being woken up with singing and a special tray in bed with the Swedish flag (we had a real miniature flag on a little stand), hot chocolate, and a few special presents or cards to open in bed.
In Sweden it is typical to have your whole family burst into your room singing at the top of their lungs. After you are grown and no longer living at home, relatives take pleasure in calling super early on the phone to sing to you.
The year that my husband remembered this tradition and brought me a tray in the morning with a little handmade flag printed from the internet and taped onto a popsicle stick… warmed my heart like no expensive or fancy gift could.
Fun to hear these ideas/traditions… My two kiddos have the same exact bday (3 years apart), so I will have to lay the traditions and extra-specialness on thick in year’s to come!
So many birthday traditions in my house growing up- birthday child picks the dinner menu, leftover cake for breakfast the next day, handmade cards from the other sibs, etc. I just hosted MY son’s first birthday, and I was so much fun thinking of future traditions we will have: http://vtmamateurs.com/2012/02/23/super-sweet-1st-birthday/
We greet the birthday boy in his room with a cupcake that he is allowed to eat in bed (violating every rule we normally have about sweets and eating not in the kitchen). And if the party is different from the actual birthday – we always save at least one small gift to be opened on the actual birthday.
The only real tradition — thing we do every birthday — is to release balloons into our boys’ rooms. They wake up and find a dozen or two balloons either floating from the ceiling or bouncing around the floor. (Helium or air filling depends on whether fans are on.)
My grandmother always did a candy pie for everyone’s birthday (and with 5 children and 10 grandchildren there were a LOT of candy pies). But it’s not your average pie like you might think.
She used a box and tied individual strings to a variety of candy bars (her arsenal usually included kit kats, snickers, mounds, etc.). Then she poked each string through wrapping paper which she then used to cover the top opening of the box. Everyone would grab a random string (except for the birthday boy/girl – their string was labeled with their name), and on command, pulled! It was so fun to see what kind of candy you pulled out! And the bonus for the birthday person was that their string not only had candy tied to it, but a slew of other gifts tied together on an endless piece of string.
So fun! And I plan on keeping that tradition for birthdays when we start our family!
We have so many traditions in store for our kiddos! Waking up with a room full of balloons, special pancake breakfast, some place wild and crazy for lunch (think Chuck E. Cheese), and they get to pick dinner and dessert to enjoy with our big family (how we refer to grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) A trip to the toy store to choose a gift (this is also special one-on-one time with mom and dad) and its a wrap!
I generally love traditions, celebrations and holidays. My husband, on the other hand, thinks that they are frivolous and self-indulgent, especially birthdays. I’m not sure what that will mean for our children. We usually celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, Valentines, New Years etc. by making a special effort to be ‘nice’ and accommodating of one another, and sometimes a day out together. I would imagine we will extend that tradition to our kids’ birthdays.
But the streamer doorway is kind of too cute to pass up…
I am loving reading these suggestions. Streamers are indeed a GO. I might also go crazy and wake him up with a cupcake in bed. Unless I’m tending to an infant or something.
Balloons? That is my new tradition. How magical to wake up to balloons!! But, for us, no matter what happens or where we are, the boys get woken up to a breakfast treat (usually because it’s their absolute favorite except for that one year that it was a really stressful birthday eve and I had to make do with picking up a processed cinnamon roll from the gas station) with the appropriate number of candles and the happy b-day song. It’s the most intimate and special “happy birthday” of the day.
[...] What are your birthday traditions? [...]