And Now He’s Four – Birthday Party Revisited

Well, the birthday party went off without a hitch, and our three year old is now a four year old. My wife wrote the other day about some of her ideas for the party, and I have to say that she was spot on. Well, except for the fact that she let our son pick the colors of his cake, and he opted for pink frosting (pink is his favorite color — more on this later)…

The theme of the party was ‘transportation,’ and we dragged out all of the appropriate toys to set the mood… Trains, planes, cars, you name it. One of the big activities was making airplanes from a clothespin, a pipecleaner, some miniature popsicle sticks, some paper, and a straw. The clothespin served as the body of the plane, the popsicle sticks got hot-glued on as the tail, the pipecleaner got twisted up into a propeller, the wings were made of paper (slipped into the slot in the clothespin), and we slipped a bit of straw into the slot behind the wings to hold them in place. We also had the kids play “Pin the Propellor on the Airplane.”

One minor change from our original plan was that, instead of giving out the Hot Wheels in the treat bags, we decided to play Hot (Wheels) Potato. I arranged the kids in a circle, handed a car to one of them, and then threw Buckwheat Zydeco’s “Choo-Choo Boogaloo” in the CD player. We then had the kids pass the car around the circle until the music stopped. Whoever was holding it at that point had to leave the circle, but got to keep the car. We kept this up until everyone had a car, and it was a rousing success.

The other thing that we did was to read books while the kids had their cake and ice cream. We had originally planned to have a quiet ‘story time’ during the party, but this worked out even better. I read Jay Jay the Jet Plane Earns His Wings and If I Built a Car (I’m not sure why, but I love that book), and our eight year old got in on the action by reading The Little Engine that Could.

Oh, and to all you dads our there that are dismayed because your preschool-aged son loves pink… Don’t worry. He’ll grow out of it as soon as he picks up on the idea that pink is “for girls.” Believe me, there will be no pink frosting by the time he gets to grade school (at least not if he can help it).