Keeping Up With The Joneses

We human beings, by nature, have a competitive drive.  We compete with each other in sports and schoolwork.  We compete for promotions at work and for recognition in the community.

And when we have kids, sometimes they become wrapped up in our competitiveness too.

It’s that time of year again – it’s almost Anna’s birthday. 

Her first and second birthdays were just simple family gatherings at which she was showered with presents and ate lots of cake.  But, those get-togethers were as much for her adult relatives as they were for her.

Removing mini Dora and Diego from the cake!

By the time she turned 2, she was able to comprehend that her birthday was a special day. She loved us singing “Happy Birthday” to her, and of course, she loved playing with her cousins and getting presents – especially her Dora the Explorer tricycle.  But she still didn’t really understand the significance of birthdays.

Over this past year, however, Anna has started to get more excited about birthdays. She loves singing “Happy Birthday” to me now – even when it’s not my birthday.  She was also appalled that we didn’t have a cake for my birthday, and that turning another year older isn’t exactly as exciting for us grown-ups as it is for her.

Especially as her parents are on an uphill path to 40.

Now, Anna is well aware that she is about to turn 3.  She can tell you the date of her birthday, how old she will be, and that she will have balloons and cake.  Every time we’re in the grocery store, she looks at birthday cards and Mylar balloons with her favorite cartoon characters on them and asks for them. Needless to say, she's excited well in advance of the actual day.

Of course, all of this is normal. We’re eager for her birthday celebration too.  I would be totally confident about our party planning ….. if only we hadn’t recently been to the most awesome birthday party ever for one of Anna’s friends.

We were excited because Anna is crazy about this kid. I knew it would be fun, but I didn’t know quite how fun until we pulled up to the curb and the first thing we saw was the giant bounce house.

I was duly impressed.  Anna was ecstatic.

But there was more.  We went inside and were greeted by a ton of people and even more excellent food. There was an awesome Elmo cake and a life-size Elmo balloon that the kids took turns chasing.  There was a cookout with hot dogs and hamburgers.  There was fried chicken, fruit, vegetables, cupcakes, plentiful sodas and juice for the kids….you get my drift.  There were really cool gift bags for the kiddos too.

It was the Mercedes of birthday parties.

We had an awesome time.  As we left, I began internally asking one question:  How can we manage to do something that cool??

We may be lawyers, but not the wealthy kind. We’re more the struggling, massively indebted, day care poor, used car driving kind.  We can certainly get Anna some nice presents….but there’s no way we can come up with something that fabulous for her, at least not this year.

But we also can’t do just a family party (with mostly adults) for her when she has some awesome little friends that she’d love to play with. Which leads to another issue – unfortunately, we can’t invite all of the kids in her day care class.  

It had been a fairly small class, but now it’s been converted to a more preschool-like class and has almost doubled in size.  Passing out invitations to only a few kids should be easy – we can just slip them in the parent mailboxes for those kids.  My fear is that the kids may talk about it at school and make other kids feel left out.

And I’d HATE that. I would feel awful.

I contemplated inviting everyone and hoping only a few would come, but what if they all did?  We simply can’t afford to feed that many kids.

We also can’t afford to rent a giant bounce house. It’ll more likely be simple games, maybe pizza, presents, and cake in our backyard.

2nd b-day: tower o' presents

I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with that kind of party. So why do I feel somehow inferior?

We’re all in different situations, and times are tough, especially now, for many people.  I’m not going to try to “outdo” anybody.  What I do care about is how Anna will feel – I don’t want her to be disappointed in her birthday celebration. I wish the “but so-and-so’s mom does this” years hadn’t begun so early.

Hopefully she’ll just be happy to have family and friends and yummy food and presents.  When it comes down to it, Anna is so loving and sweet that I can’t imagine her being upset about this. I just wish I didn’t feel this ridiculous need to compare myself on her behalf to what other parents do– clearly, that is my issue, not hers.  It’s especially frustrating because I generally don’t worry too much about what other people think. Why this?

Do you feel this way sometimes?  If so, I’d love to hear about how you handle it. And I'd appreciate some advice about how to handle the delicate issue of invitations.  Does anyone else out there have birthday party envy?