Son's Birthday Party - Ideas

[Peacock]

My son is turning 9 on June 30. We'd hoped to just invite all his buddies over for a pool party, but the pool is still in boxes in the garage. If everything goes perfectly we should get it assembled and at least ready to fill by Sunday, but nothing ever goes perfectly around here. So who knows?

If you were a 9 year old boy...would you rather wait a few weeks past your birthday to have your party, and have the kind of party you'd been wanting? Or would you rather have it on or near your birthday and do something different?

Here's the alternative I've been thinking about.

My son is into Geocaching this summer. For the uninitiated, Geocaching is sort of a treasure hunt. People hide containers filled with little "gifts" - happy meal toys, dollar store trinkets, etc., or maybe just a log book - and other folks with GPS gadgets get on Geocaching.com to get the coordinates, then go find them. If there's "swag" there, you are supposed to trade an item for an item. There are also "travel bugs" and "geocoins" that get swapped and travel around the world. But the fun is in the hunt!

We don't have a big place, just 1.5 acres, but big enough I think for us to hide some "caches". We can also use the field and woods behind our place. My idea is to have a geocaching party. Split the kids up in to groups of 3, let them take turns with the GPS and find the caches within a set time limit, and they get to keep the goodies inside.

While they wait we'll also have summer fun stuff like water guns, water balloons, maybe even a slip & slide, sprinkler to run through, etc.

What do you think? Would the average 9 year old boy get into this, or think it's just weird?

[Wildwood Flower]

I think it sounds like a great party!

[Pink_Carnation]

I would just see what your son wants to do...if he thinks it sounds good the others will probably like it.

[Jan Doling]

One of my kids waits a few weeks and the other can barely make it to her birthday. We put up the tent and grill and pretended we were at a campground (I even put the camping toilet out there). There was a table and lawn chairs and they had a ball. I checked on them from afar a few times, but they thought they were all on their own and want to do it again next year.

[rwinsouthla]

We just did something very similar for my 6 YO. We bought two slip n slides from Walmart ($6 each) and set up another garden pulsating sprinkler. Afterwards we hid boxes on the edge of the woods with bags for their goods they were going to get, a box with water guns, one with Mardi gras beads, one with cheap plastic gold coins, one with the FUNDIP powdered sugar packs, and one with about 20 lbs of candy they could pull from. Each one had a note inside with clues as to where the next box was and they had to find it. They had a BLAST!!!! The trinkets in the boxes went into the bags for their party favors. It was fun watching them jet off en masse as a group to go to the next box. Net spent with the cake (homemade), ice cream, slip n slides and trinkets was $40.

[Burbsteader]

I would discuss this with your family and run the idea by them.
But the geocaching sounds like a lot of fun to me and keeps the kids outside, which is a very smart idea.

I used to have birthday parties at home for each of the boys (one in June and one in July). It was never elaborate, but pizza, snacks, goodies, cake and ice cream.
The kids always had a lot of fun and each kid would get something to play with OUTSIDE! (cheapie squirt guns, beach balls, pop-its, that sort of thing) in their goody bags.

Last year I did something different and I'm happy to do it again this year. The boys are having a combined party at the nearby college. Parents drop off the kids with us. The kids get an hour of climbing wall, an hour of pool, with a cupcake, juice box and a goody bag at the end. No fuss, no muss.

I realized that by the time I fed all those kids pizzas at home and fussed with cake and ice cream that it wasn't as cheap as I thought. Parents usually stayed which meant I had to buy extra pizzas, pop, cake and ice cream for them too. There was usually at least one or 2 younger siblings I had to deal with as well. We have a small house and it got crowded FAST.