Birthday parties

It's birthday party season around here. Isaac's birthday was in early September, and he has one good friend with a mid-August birthday, but now that it's October the pace is really picking up. He has been invited to four birthday parties this month -- two of them on the same day!

Why so many fall birthdays among Isaac's friends? Part of it can be explained by Isaac's enrollment in developmental kindergarten.

Children who are born in the first six months of the year -- January through June -- usually go straight to kindergarten in the fall following their fifth birthday. In California the cut-off date for starting kindergarten is December 2 (although the law has just been changed!), so children born in the next five months of the year -- July through November -- could also start kindergarten, but in our community they often don't. So the birthdays for the children enrolled in DK with Isaac range from July to December, with the majority in September, October, and November. Nobody wants their kid to start kindergarten while he is still four years old.

Anyway, Isaac has a lot of classmates born in the fall, so he is going to a lot of birthday parties. As Isaac's friends are still too young for these to be drop-off parties, this means our family is going to a lot of birthday parties. These are looking like they will be big parties, too -- either all 20 classmates are invited, or all 13 male classmates are invited. Once you add in siblings and parents, that's a lot of people.

Isaac is not a fan of big crowds. For his first and second birthdays, we threw big parties. For his third birthday, though, he told us emphatically that he did not want a big party; he wanted only relatives, and that's what he got.

For his fourth birthday I asked him if he would be comfortable inviting four friends, and he thought that sounded okay. I set up a chemistry lab in our yard, and the kids did two activities: they made a fizzing concoction of baking soda and vinegar, and a non-Newtonian fluid from cornstarch and water. The kids had a good time at the party, although Isaac was just a little overwhelmed by it.

For Isaac's fifth birthday last month, we did the same thing, except he invited five friends, and our theme was paleontology. There were three activities*: the kids hunted "dinosaur" eggs hidden in the yard; they excavated cardboard Pachycephalosaurus bones buried in the sandbox and then assembled the skeleton; and they chipped out plastic dinosaurs that had been encased in plaster. The kids had a really good time -- even Isaac.

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But what about Laurel? Her first birthday party was attended by her maternal grandparents and her godmother, but no kids her own age. By the time he was one, Isaac knew ten or 15 kids his own age; Laurel knows two or three. And she actually likes other kids! Seriously, one of my goals is to find some nice two-year-olds to invite to her second birthday party in January. This is embarrassing.

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*I made all the activities myself! I am the Martha Stewart of paleontology parties!