ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

Surviving a birthday party.

We have just survived our son’s birthday party.  Even though they were only twelve kids plus two toddlers with three parent-helpers, it was still hard to manage, and it was not even hosted at our house. 

I have hard time imaging how people can manage to host a party more than 10 people.  I had an experience hosting a birth celebration party for my son with a turn out of over 30 people.  The challenge was to prepare enough food to feed those people and to keep the food warm enough before the dinner started.  That party turned out to be okay because I had my mom and my brother to help out with cooking and food preparation, and my son was pretty cooperative too.  My son was very mellow when he was a baby, always keeping a watchful eye.  You would seldom hear him crying.

I tried to keep a tradition of inviting my friends and colleagues over for Chinese New Year celebration.  However, that was short-lived after three years.  Each year, I would have fewer people showing up and each year I was challenged with the amount of food to prepare and especially with the ability to keep them warm without spoiling the freshness and taste of the food.  Finally, I gave up.  It was tough to do it all alone by myself. 

Anyway, back to the birthday party.  My son was excited with the bowling, at least for the first half an hour.  It is hard to keep the attention of kids like his age.  We were struggling to get everyone back to bowling.  There were other attractions competing for their attention.  It seemed that the arcade games were more appealing.  Maybe next time, we should go to Chuck E. Cheese’s.  By the way, throwing a birthday party is not cheap.  I am thinking that the next time he will have another birthday party may be 4 years from now.  In between, we may host one for his sister.  We will see.  It was really harder than we thought.  Oh, actually, it was harder than I thought.  My husband did warn me about that.  He has very little confidence on anything I do.