Last Saturday it was my little big man’s 3rd birthday party. It was, I’ll admit an occasion I was partly dreading. He’s not great at parties and never really wants to join in. Part of me considered it a massive waste of time, energy and money throwing a party for a kid who’d much rather run around with his chums than sit down and partake in an activity session. Thankfully I was wrong.

We’d invited 20 of his bestest friends forever to our local church hall, booked a very nice lady from Rhythm & Rhyme to come and entertain the troops and my mother ordered a cake, a very expensive, very amazing cake.

Apart from the cake we did the rest of the food ourselves. We went to Aldi, I made a stack of sandwiches. We had crisps, pizzas, dips, cakes, fruit, biscuits and juice. Standard toddler fayre.

The party went rather swimmingly and was a real whirlwind of fun. He behaved himself impeccably, only really throwing a wobbly when he was accidentally kicked in the head by another child.

He properly joined in with Rhythm & Rhyme, passed the parcels, he ate most of his buffet, graciously listened to everyone singing happy birthday and then blew his three candles out leaving surprisingly little spittle on the cake. We all clapped. Everyone left with a fairly decent party bag and a wedge of cake.

It was a simple party, and it seemed to us like we’d thrown it together at the last minute, but I think it was a success. We’ve had lots of positive comments since so that’s always good.

The next task is to sit down and write thank you cards. If you came and bought him a present, thank you, really, he got some amazing presents, you’ll get a card soon, I promise.

Next year I won’t fear his party, I reckon it’ll be cool and he’ll be old enough to tell us more about what he wants, within reason. It was worth the stress and the making of egg mayonnaise at midnight just to see his happy face, plus he’s talked of nothing else since. Happy birthday son x