The Po Show

STUFF MY BEAR!!!!!

Today was the long anticipated and much ballyhooed Build-A-Bear Workshop birthday party. 14 kids! Choosing and stuffing and "washing" and heart inserting and shirt choosing and parading around yelling "I MADE MY BEAR!!!!!" Then up to the food court for pizza and Ben and Jerry's.

Tessa said it was a great party, though she seemed vaguely overwhelmed through most of it. It was pretty intense, though it was 10AM and thus not busy at BABW yet and the whole deal was a lot less chaotic than I had been expecting. It all went very smoothly for what it was, and two hours and $350 later it was all over. Yay.

Matthew held it together very well for most of the party, only tearing up a bit once when he was confused over the sequence of events (he had misunderstood when the hearts were to be chosen to put into the bears and he got frustrated when I tried to explain). But all in all he did great during this event that was so clearly Tessa's time in the spotlight. He was still concerned about the fairness of whether Tessa will have another birthday celebration on her "real" birthday (which doesn't come for another 24 days) and we have yet to figure out what we'll do for his birthday, but he made it through this day, Tessa's first school friend birthday party, quite well.

This year, Tessa attended parties for nine school friends and there will be a couple more later in the month. It really set the bar for her expectation of what a friend birthday party is all about, in a way that I'm not totally comfortable with. They were all pretty elaborate parties, held at "party places," with varying degrees of high end favors and entertainment. Not one home party with a homemade cake. She went to one last week at a dedicated party event place that had a very fancy kitchen set up so all the kids could make cupcakes during the party. I looked on the website of this place and it said that parties *started* at $750 for 15 kids, with additional kids being $25 apiece. Yikes.

This may change when she goes to K next fall, when not all the kids will come from wealthy families as is the case with her nursery school currently. But I worry that she (and now Matthew) will have the feeling that a birthday party has to be at a fancy place to be fun, that you have to give and receive $25 presents, that in order for a birthday to truly be happy a lot of money has to be spent.

For this year, though, she loved the birthday party she had, and that makes me happy. And I get to have my four year old baby for 24 more days, before she turns into this big kid five year old.