December 17, 2005 - Saturday
Whose crazy idea was this, having a dozen 5-6 year-olds all together in our house? Admittedly, I was a little stressed out about Harry's party, but we planned and scheduled and it actually turned out very well. Amazingly, no parents stayed with their kids, a first in my limited experience with birthday parties and surely (I've essentially confirmed this) the result of week-before-Christmas errands needing to be done. Somehow that took a little of the pressure off. I mean, kids will be kids and find something to have fun doing. The hard part is keeping it friendly and safe and at least mildly reined in. Sure, we thought about having a party at a "place," like the Funworld, the bowling alley, or one of the gymnastics places, but in the end it just seemed like that was a cop-out. Couldn't we be imaginative and think of something that would be fun and special for Harry? Wouldn't it be better to teach the boys to use their imaginations, instead of just throwing money at a problem. The answer was this Star Wars party.

The only way for me to do a party like this is to have a plan. So, with some parties ideas from the web, we came up with essentially a schedule of activities several ideas. Before the party I build lightsabers (shown above), one for each kid, out of swimming pool noodles. They're soft enough so they could swing them around and even hit each other without anyone getting hurt. I had figured we could let them do that freely for about 3 minutes. After that we'd play games. The first of which was to have them try to keep a balloon in the air using only the lightsaber, Jedi training we called it. At 6, kids' hand-eye coordination is still developing and only a couple of kids lasted more than a few seconds. We played a couple of games. Then the pinata (shown above) that we painted to look like the Empire's death star (you can just barely see the big black circle on the left side). We actually had the kids try to hit it with the noodle lightsabers for a while, thereby dragging it out a while, then finally let them use Jeremy's hard plastic lightsaber. After that we went upstairs for the other game that we found on the web. We stuck a picture of Princess Leia inside one of about 90 balloons and let the kids pop them until someone found the picture and "freed the princess"; wonderfully controlled pandemonium. Surreptitiously, I saw right away that it was Jeremy who grabbed the Princess' balloon, but it took him the whole time to pop it, so all the balloons got popped. I suppose they would have anyway, but the search lasted the entire time, too. I learned later that poor Harry, our birthday boy, couldn't pop any balloons. He had taken off his shoes and stomping seemed to be the only method the kids could get to work (I had to reach in and help Jeremy squeeze: he didn't have shoes either, although I tend to doubt he would have been able to do it that way either).

After the Darth Vader cake (Hadley overtly positioned herself next to Harry and he seemed to think that was just fine: she's his "girlfriend" after all) and presents we still had another 25 minutes to fill and the kids went back downstairs. It was a dangerous time because there was no plan. Fortunately, we hadn't tapped into the balloon launcher yet and that filled the void nicely, but with two exceptions. First, it was the time when all of the parents were starting to arrive and so all they saw of the party was this seemingly utter chaos of kids running around the concrete basement floor wildly waving these noodle lightsabers. It was probably fine, but who knows what people think.

The second problem was that Rip got voilent with Harry. Apparently Rip got hit in the nose by a lightsaber by one of the other kids, not Harry. I'm fairly certain it didn't hurt him, but he used the occasion to flex his emotions, something that he has done at every party I seen him at. It was a rather bizarre little act, really, complete with the possessed look in his eyes of a some poor TV show or horrorshow B-movie actor. I actually didn't see what happened, but by Rip's own admission he "got mad, so [he] tried to hurt Harry." And hurt Harry he did, not seriously, but he hit him hard enough with either the lightsaber or his hands to make Harry cry and cause a large red welt on his wrist. After that, Rip went overtly stomping upstairs. I suppose in a sense the swinging lightsabers were an accident waiting to happen, but this, as far as I can tell, was a deliberate act by a child looking for attention. Awkwardly, it's an act that he's gone to in one form or another at all the other parties we've seen him at. I have always viewed it as a kind of power grab kind of thing. The difference is that this time it was violent. More disturbingly, Harry has seemed to be on the receiving end of it every time. I'm no expert on this stuff, but I'm betting that since Rip is an only child, Harry, who is much smaller physically than Rip, is getting to play the role of his younger brother/social interaction guinea pig. All of that isn't really so bad in the big picture. It's just kids being kids and Harry's dealt with it before and probably would have forgotten it. Indeed, I don't really think Harry ever saw Rip coming or knew what was going on. But, Rip was still power playing when we all came upstairs to say goodbye to the other kids and told Harry that it had been a bad party. When I asked Harry at dinner how he liked the party he didn't even mention Rip hitting him. Instead, he reacted to Jeremy talking about who he was going to invite to his next party saying, "don't invite Rip, he'll say your party wasn't fun." I can only hope that Harry and I have talked enough about Rip's similar behavior in the past to know that it has nothing to do with Harry or how good a party it was. I think it was a great party and that all of the kids, except Rip, had a good time. My guess is that overall Harry thinks the same.


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