Our not-so-little chunky monkey turned 7 years old over the weekend so this post is all about our weekend celebrating him.
Both of his sisters had quarantine birthdays last April that happened to fall right as lockdown was implemented. Obviously, neither of them had birthday parties and we celebrated their special days quietly at home as a family.
Naturally, I told D the same would be happening for him with his birthday coming up this month. The problem is that in between his sisters’ birthdays in April and his own birthday right now, we had an entire summer where social bubbles were allowed, restrictions were loosened, and we DID see people and have people over, we were just super selective about who those people were. So even though D understood we wouldn’t be having a big blowout birthday party with his whole class at school invited like we usually would, he assumed we would at least be able to have a few family friends over.
I did try and manage his expectations, especially with the COVID surge the Bay Area is having right now but in the end, I decided to invite three little boys of families we’ve been seeing all of quarantine over for a very small birthday celebration.
But let me rewind a bit – we kicked off bday celebrations on Friday with some cupcakes dropped off at his school pod.
I actually didn’t know that sharing treats was a thing that they were allowing until the day BEFORE because even pre-pandemic the public school stopped allowing this due to various food allergy concerns. But hey, this is a private pod so maybe things are different? I didn’t question it! I just showed up with the goods on Friday afternoon 🙂
Then on Saturday, we had the small “party” that I talked about …
D’s interests vary everywhere from Bey Blades to Super Mario so the theme of his party decor was reflective of that. I pulled together some simple Super Mario party favors (I added an extra one for D himself to have) with cookies, candy, etc.
Then the guests arrived! I sent them all out to the backyard to start with some laser tag to hopefully get some energy out. Also, we had INSANELY gorgeous weather this weekend and it would have been a shame to not take advantage of it.
Eventually, though, the boys got bored and found their way inside where an epic Super Smash Bros video game tournament was about to go down. All props go to Hubby for sitting and playing video games with these boys ALL. NIGHT. LONG. I mean, not that it was torturous for him or anything but still, it made it the easiest party ever for me personally because I didn’t have to do a thing to keep the kids entertained.
Hours of video games followed by some pizza and cake …
One very excited little boy …
Finished off with even more video games and then a movie night (3 Ninjas! Who remembers that movie from the 90s?!) to end everything off. I kept the girls away from the party for most of the time but they obviously got to eat pizza and have cake with everyone else and then when the movie got turned on, I told them it was fine to join in.
Everyone was picked up and our kids were in bed by 9pm. Not too bad for a birthday party and I think D had a TON of fun. I could tell he was getting tired by the end though because his patience with his friends was starting to wear thin aka, I was hearing a lot of whining and complaining like “You guys! WAIT for ME! HMPH!” type of stuff. LOL.
After everyone was tucked in, J & I got busy wrapping even more birthday presents for the birthday boy. We have a birthday tradition in our family where the birthday kid gets a bouquet of balloons waiting for them in the morning alongside their pile of gifts. Fun fact: for both girls’ birthdays last year, we couldn’t find ANY open party stores that would fill helium balloons due to the pandemic shutdowns (and the balloon section of our local grocery stores wouldn’t do it either for the same reasons) so neither of our daughters got birthday bouquets last year. But 10 months into the pandemic and businesses have figured out a way to keep things running so D got to have his annual bouquet of balloons waiting per usual 🙂
Along with the pile of gifts (among which were new rollerblades and a pogo stick), D also got a shiny new bike for his birthday …
One might think that with a birthday so close to Christmas, or right after the holidays, that we wouldn’t spoil him so much on his birthday and you’d think WRONG. I am actually adamantly OPPOSED to lumping together birthdays with other big holidays. Listen, it’s not your kid’s fault that they were born in the month they were born in (close to this holiday or that holiday). Everyone else who doesn’t have a holiday near their birthday gets celebrated BIG on their day so I don’t think having a birthday two weeks after Christmas should make that any different for D.
So on D’s actual birthday, he had to get up early for soccer practice and it was a S T R U G G L E. Everyone was so tired, even J & I slept through our initial alarm of when we wanted to get up and wake D up. Because we were running late, we just woke him up and whispered a quick “Happy Birthday!” (because sisters were still sleeping), then rushed him off to the soccer field. When he got back home, he got to open all the gifts from us. He rushed in and opened all of them without telling us (we’d told him to wash his hands and change out of his soccer clothes but he took that time to sneak into his room silently and just rip into all the gifts) so I don’t have any pictures of him opening gifts *facepalm.
I think of the gifts WE got him, the rollerblades were his favorite. He immediately wanted to try them out and then proceeded to spend the next hour in our backyard practicing riding on them.
We basically just had a lazy day of playing with opened presents and spending tons of time together. I think we did most of our hardcore celebrating the day before when his friends were over and everyone just needed to take the actual day to recharge and recoup. This random picture of my four loves is my favorite one from D’s actual bday.
Then we had takeout from D’s favorite Korean restaurant for dinner. It’s been an annual tradition that we drive to this restaurant and eat there for D’s birthday but obviously .. that wasn’t going to happen this year so we brought the food home to us. It still tasted just as good 🙂
Then time for the Happy Birthday song one last time, this time with a donut cake.
Donut monster… I think he ate 3 donuts total that day.
And then we ended with a family movie night (of which I have no picture) and that was it! We watched Studio Gibli’s The Cat Returns and it was oddly hilarious just because of how STRANGE the film was. It wasn’t scary at all and my kids thought it was funny. My brother gifted the entire Studio Gibli DVD box set to E when she was much, much younger and we still haven’t gone through most of the movies even though we own them. So Uncle A, if you’re reading this – thank you!
Monday was a holiday due to MLK Day but we didn’t really do any birthday celebrating. You know what we did do though …
Welcome this little booger back home!
He’s been away at a board & train program for the past three weeks so we were really happy to finally get him back. I’ll have a more in-depth post on this up later this week so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss that post!
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