Things I’ve Learnt about Party Planning

Delegation

When relatives and friends offer to help, don’t be polite! Hand them a bowl of crisps or a bubble blower and let them help, they wouldn’t have offered if they weren’t willing to muck in! You have spent precious hours planning a perfect party for your child, allow yourself the time to witness the joy on their face as they revel in your hard work. Besides which, you need to be available to keep an eye on what’s going on - to spot that tea and coffee needs replenishing, that some juice needs mopping up or that activities are running later than scheduled. I usually assign family members a particular role in advance - including a designated photographer - and will gladly say yes on the day if a friend offers to hand out drinks or party bags.

Lists Galore!

When party planning I have a pile of lists so that I can keep track of everything - which children have received an invite and which have RSVPed, food ideas, party bag fillers, timed itinerary of the party activities plus an ongoing ‘To Do’ checklist. I feel so much calmer when I can keep track of everything and know that I haven’t forgotten to invite anyone and that plans are running smoothly. And is there anything more satisfying than crossing a job off a list?! I admit it, I will add a job to a list after I’ve already done it just so I can cross it off!

Craft Activities

My son loves a craft activity and loves doing them at his party. Having tried approaching this in different ways I find doing it at an allotted time in a small group works best. This doesn’t mean they can’t work for a big party but splitting a party of forty into four groups of ten who then take it in turns to do four different activities (see my blog about our ‘Seasons’ themed party) worked so much better for us than children working their way around tables of crafts as they arrived at the party. We tried this method at our ‘Magic’ themed party and ended up with a huge bottleneck at the first activity of decorating their party bag - the children spent much longer on this table than we’d expected and they couldn’t do the crafts in a different order as they needed their bag to put the other items in, so we had to hurry the children along. If you have enough adults to help, then a supervised table where you all have the same time on each activity worked much more smoothly - and supervision avoids one child using all the stickers on their artwork or taking more than their fair share of biscuits to decorate! If doing free-flow crafts then I’d recommend doing them in a way that means the children can do them in any order they wish.

Another thing I would recommend with crafts is keeping it simple! Keep the base craft as simple as possible by prepping aspects of it (pre-cutting items which are then all boxed separately etc) and then provide lots of scope for decorating/adding to it (see my snowmen in my ‘Seasons’ blog as an example) - that way the guests can spend as much or as little time as they want on their masterpiece and you can also hurry the process along if you’re running behind schedule. Besides which, adding the sparkles and stickers is surely the most fun part of a craft anyway!

Time-fillers and time-savers

Make sure you have an idea beforehand of what activities your child is most bothered about doing and which activities wouldn’t cause tears if they were missed (including your own tears, who wants to take home 30 unused hand-cut unicorns for your own child to be decorating forever more?!) I tend to have a set itinerary which includes a couple of games that can be axed if necessary, plus a separate list of back-up games to tag on to the end of the party if they have whizzed through the proceedings quicker than expected.

Allow for extras

I don't think I've ever hosted a birthday party where we haven't had some extra children - guests who hadn't RSVP-ed or siblings of guests. Try to allow extra craft resources and food to allow for this scenario, at least it won't add more stress to the day for you if you've come prepared!