Birthday Parties for Tiny House Kids

We recently celebrated Sunshine's fifth birthday, and as is the case with most five-year-olds, she was over-the-moon excited about her birthday party.

So how do we pull off birthday parties in our small house?

The secret is nothing special or exciting. The truth is that we don't even try.

For each of our daughters' first birthdays, we rented out local frozen yogurt shops, and, honestly, that is my favorite kind of party. All we had to do was reserve the time, show up, put up a few table decorations, and eat yummy frozen yogurt. Easy peasy, and those local small business owners were always thrilled that we wanted to party at their place.

As our kids get older, though, they want to run around and play, and that makes the local fro-yo shop less of an option. For Sunshine's second birthday, we set up a bubble theme in our church's gym, and it was so much more work than I ever thought it would be! We had to roll in the tables and set up chairs and decorate from scratch. It was a really fun party, though. Still, between all that work and being four months pregnant with Sweetheart at the time, I completely overwhelmed myself and vowed never again!

Sunshine has an early fall birthday, so we've been taking a chance on having nice weather the last couple of years and hosting our guests at local parks. It's worked out well.

This year, Sunshine decided she wanted a Leapfrog birthday party (as in the cartoon/learning empire), and that was a bit of a stretch for us to plan. You can't just go to the store or hit up Amazon for Leapfrog-themed party supplies. We kept it fairly simple with a few homemade decorations (thank you Pinterest!) and a store-bought cake that she chose that had nothing to do with the theme. (Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the decorations actually at the park.)

The highlight of the party was a treasure chest that my dad made from scrap wood. We locked the homemade pinata and party favor bags inside the trunk and used a letter combination padlock to keep it all hidden until game time. Then Chris hid the letters of Sunshine's (real) name on the playground while all the kids were eating their cake. They had to find the letters and unscramble the code to get inside the chest. It was a lot of fun.

For next year, she's already planning a party at a climbing center about an hour away, so we're going to have to save up our pennies for that one! I'm hoping she'll choose something a little closer to home and a little less expensive when the time comes.

Sweetheart's birthday is a little harder because it's in the middle of winter, and parks around here are generally not great places for parties during the rainy season! We skipped a big party in favor of donuts at grandpa's house this year. I'm trying to brainstorm ideas for her third birthday that's only a few months away, though. I'm really not sure where we'll end up!

I wish I could share this awesome post about how we manage to host fantastic parties in our tiny house, but the honest truth is that we don't entertain here often. Most of our family and friends love to host and have great homes for entertaining, and that's just easier for all of us. We had a couple of big parties here in the past before we had kids, but it's harder now with little ones underfoot, and we're okay with that.