We have an awesome, new-to-us, larger house now & we get to have birthday sleepovers! I have never hosted a sleepover of more than 3 friends, I think, and we were all super excited to do this!
A week ahead of time we sent out invitations. I hear you are not allowed to send invitations to school unless you invite the whole class, but I’ve never gotten that in writing, so I did it anyways. Jess Jr. was so excited about his very first sleepover that he wrote all of the invitations himself on colored paper with a marker. They were so cute! (Picture would have been great here, but I failed to get one). However, I thought as a mom if I received an invitation to a party that was all written by a child, I would possibly not fully believe the party was a real thing, so I threw some cards together to send with Jess’s. Mine were simply index cards I wrote all of the information on and threw some colored masking tape around for a border. Super cheap and got the job done. I sent Jess Jr. to school with the invitations and waited for R.S.V.P.s.
Knowing the day and age we live in and the fact that I am horrible at answering phone calls, I put “RSVP via text message” on the invitations. They all RSVP-ed, even the ones that could not come. I did have 2 parents call me after they had texted, but by that time I had them in my contacts as “Suzy – John’s Mom – Jess Jr” or something like that and knew to answer the call. This is honestly the best way to go in my opinion. No parent wants to have to call to RSVP and the ones that have questions will call anyways, so Win-Win.
I wondered leading up to the party what I should plan. Do I need to occupy these kids’ time for the entire time they are at my house? Do I have to have the time blocked out with back to back activities? I asked a few people and all of them said I did not which was fabulous since we do not roll like that in the Voirol household. I did get a few activities ready in case I needed to occupy them for a bit or redirect them at any time.
The day before the party, we went grocery shopping. On top of my 2 week meal plan food, I reserved $50 for Jess Jr. to pick out any snacks and drinks he wanted for the party. This made Jess Jr. feel more in charge of his own party, let him get things I never let him get on regular shopping trips, helped him make good choices about what he was choosing to as snacks/drinks and helped him work with a budget. He got more and more excited as we checked out with all of his party stuff and when we put it in the special “Party Cabinet” at home.
Saturday at 3pm came and all of a sudden I had five 8 year olds, two 5 year olds and a 12 year old at my house. Without going minute by minute, here are the things they did:
Nerf battle
Video Games
Nerf battle
Pizza
Video games
Crafts
Roasting s’mores
Video games
Movie
Chess
Movie
Sleep
Wake Up
Donuts
Nerf Battle
Video Games
Nerf Battle
There was very little structured time actually. They all played well together and I let them run around as much as they wanted. I am not a huge fan of video games, but let them play more than I usually would because they still talked the whole time and they were playing the video games on different devices with each other. The craft we did was simple. I gave each of them a poster board, provided markers, glue, sparkles and other stuff you can glue onto stuff and said “make whatever you want.” This satisfied all of the boys for at least 20 minutes. After that time, half of the boys went back to Nerf battling and the others finished their project. We have a fire pit in the backyard, so s’mores were easy and fun. I bought a variety pack of full size Hershey’s bars and let them each pick what kind of chocolate they wanted on their s’more. Donuts were already bought and I didn’t have to cook breakfast, so that was amazing.
I really thought before this happened that it would be a crazy, wild, uncontrollable s**t show, but it was So FuN! I think maybe thinking it would be so wild helped me be less stressed since a little wild was better than what I was expecting.
So, there you have it. It was super simple, fairly cheap & so much fun!
MAKE GOOD CHOICES.
~Love & Light, Sarah
Adventures of Life, Death, Love & Light 