To celebrate Corwin’s birthday (as he didn’t think the concert counted) we had a party at our house. Corwin invited 12 guests, of which 11 (10 boys, 1 girl) showed up so it was a full house. The first lesson we learned is that 12 total kids at that age is a bit much, as they have enough personality for bad interactions but not enough maturity or history to overcome it well.
Corwin’s plan for the party was
We tried to get him to envision some other activity in case it rained, but he was not forthcoming. It should have occurred to use to also wonder about handling the case where the kids got tired of playing with beating sticks, but we were lulled by the extreme popularity from last year’s party. At least we cut back to four hours from five.
We also ended up getting lucky with the weather — it was a beautiful day, low 80°s, a bit of wind, bright sun, and low humidity. And for the most part, Corwin’s plan worked. Some of the kids hung out in the basement playing with the Nerf guns, and a few others fired up the computers and gamed, and with a bit of Wii to fill in the gaps we didn’t have any “bored bored bored” comments. There were only a couple of minor meltdowns and one major one, but by the end everyone was having fun. There were some complaints about cheating and uneven teams, but I tried to avoid intervening unless absolutely necessary, because I think it’s good experience for them to work out these little conflicts on their own. I tried to get Corwin to be a little more assertive, since it was his party, but that was not very successful.
Charles played with the older kids, much more successfully than he has previously. He even got picked for teams, rather than tolerated.
But overall I think it was a successful party. At one point during the beating stick battles, a neighbor came by and dropped off a bunch of his children’s beating sticks. They had made them years before but had out grown them. I thought it was a very nice thing to do and the kids liked the new / old sticks.
So, lessons learned for next year
Battle of Children