The Birthday Party Plan - Reworked

My original plan was to have Toots' birthday party at my mum's house. She has recently landscaped the back garden and had a huge deck built. It was the ideal place to have a birthday party. We were going to barbecue, have lots of baked treats and a bouncy castle for Toots and her friends.

With the rising cost of everything and after I priced everything for the party, even sticking to the basics, I realised that the party was going to be quite expensive. I phoned around a few places we've been before for her friends' birthday parties and got a great deal with the Play Cafe.

The Play Cafe has a huge soft play area which the kids can play in for 90 minutes (30 minutes longer than anywhere else) and then we have the use of a birthday room for 45 minutes which is plenty of time. The viewing area also has a lovely coffee shop so the parents can all relax with a latte while the kids entertain themselves. The kids can have something to eat in the birthday room (which is fully decorated, apart from balloons), then we'll have time for a quick game or two of pass the parcel before blowing out the birthday candles and clearing up for the day.

I'm really pleased with this set up, partly because it means my mum and I don't have to scrape walked in cake off her new deck but also because the Play Cafe have thought of everything.

A full 90 minutes in that play area will mean that the kids will be starving enough to happily sit down and eat without putting up a fight. Plus because of the limited time in the birthday room, once the kids have finished eating we only need to entertain them for about 25 minutes before the party is over. Just time enough for a quick game, blow out the candles and hand out party bags.

The Play Cafe will provide party bags for an additional charge of £2 per child, but I've made my own up for the kids. They cost less than £2 plus I have more control over what goes in to them. Each kid gets a little pocket sized instrument, a balloon, a small bag of sugar free gummy sweets and a funsize bar of chocolate. I also have some cake boxes in case anyone wants to take their cake home.

Hopefully it will all go as planned.

All I really have to do is bring the birthday cake. I'm going to make a simple round sponge cake with the Pink Panther face above on top of he cake. Its a nice straight forward version of his face so I shouldn't have any trouble (famous last words) transferring it to the top of the cake.

St Paddy's Day Plans

Unfortunately our plans this year have been scuppered slightly by the fact that the husband won't have the day off. Normally I would get a bit miffed about the fact that somebody else made a pig's ear of their work leaving him to be the one to fix it, but not today.

Because he will have nine straight days off at Easter. Say it with me...

Woo Hoooo.

I'm still going to try and get Toots out to some of the festivities.

We're spoiled for choice this year with Downpatrick starting the St Patrick's Festival on 9 March and running right through to 17 March. I'm hoping to get a day at The Saint Patrick's Centre for some of the organised activities.

The husband will be home for the weekend so on Friday Toots and I will have a day of baking. Soda bread and barmbrack are both on the menu as well as some shillelagh cookies, which are really just sugar cookies cut into rectangles about 1in x 5in, then coated with chocolate icing and finally a little green ribbon tied around the middle and I'm still fiddling with those Guinness St Paddy's cupcakes, but they're not quite right yet.

We will be having our usual Spring barbecue again this year.

We try to have a barbecue about this time every year for the family to get together. Conveniently enough it always seems to be on Mother's Day weekend, which is always very close to my mum's birthday as well.

The men all stand together in the garden merrily cremating burgers and trying to get the kids to eat hotdogs which smell suspiciously like petrol.

The women all stand and cook edible food in the kitchen. If we didn't, trust me we'd go hungry.

The men have a few tins of Guinness and the husband has his Bushmills whiskey. They all invariably fall asleep somewhere.

The women talk for hours for play with the kids outside.

It has always been a great day and I'm really looking forward to it this year.

Do you have any plans for St Patrick's day?

If you do, or even if you don't but still want t join in, JanMary is having a lovely St Patrick's Day Blogging Carnival. She'll have a Mr Linky up on 17 March for everyone to add their posts, but that doesn't mean to say that you can't starting posting about your St Patrick's Day plans now.

Even if you don't have a post, you should head over and take a look on 17 March and read all the great posts.