Mac's 6th Birthday Party

Before I started blogging, I sent out an email about the first birthday party Mac attended once we moved to Sao Paulo. It was an elaborate and costly affair and I was sure it would be cheaper for us to vacation as a family at Disneyworld for a week than to spring for one of those parties.

So as Mac's birthday loomed closer and closer, I grew more and more nervous. Our apartment was too tiny (and too moldy although I didn't know that) to host even a few children, their siblings and parents. I checked on renting the party room in our building and that alone was about $250 to rent and it didn't really have the space for children to run around that I thought we needed. So we decided to have it at the consulate's recreation area. There's plenty of space with a soccer field, swimming pool, tables and chairs, and best of all: we weren't charged to use it!

Because we had just moved to Sao Paulo before Mac's last birthday, he didn't have a party last year and I've felt guilty about that for a whole year. So when faced with who to invite, I followed our Marine friend's life motto of "go big or go home". I felt strongly that we had to invite everybody in his class and then there were his friends in our complex and consulate friends and some kids on the school bus and church friends. You get the idea.

Because we were having it at the consulate and we had to get everybody on the security list, rsvps were a must which was a great thing for me. People don't rsvp here and so I had a clear idea of how many people we were expecting. And because the people expected numbered about 80, I knew I wasn't making food for that many people (remember we were in the temporary apartment with one pyrex dish, 2 pots, 1 measuring cup, 4 drinking cups, etc). One of the things I will miss most about Brazil is the plethora of services you can employ. We hired this wonderful company called the Blue Banana Buffet to set up three booths of food. We chose nuggets, mini-pizzas and mini-hamburgers and they threw in cotton candy as a prize. It was fantastic and easy and surprisingly delicious and all I had to do was make the carrot cakes at Mac's request. It was definitely the easiest birthday party cooking I've ever done!

The weekend of the party was overcast and rainy and we prayed and prayed for sunny weather for the party day (last Sunday). We woke up to beautiful weather in the morning but apparently we should've been more time-specific in our prayer requests because the wind started blowing around 1pm. The Blue Banana people told me rain was on the way (the party was from 2-5pm). Well by about 3:15, the skies opened up and we had a rip-roaring, thunder-booming, lightning-cracking, wind-blowing storm. I'm pretty sure it never rains inside those expensive party places in Sao Paulo. You only have these problems with the elements when you're trying to do a backyard-esque (aka affordable) birthday party.

Another problem you don't have in those party places is the electricity going off. Yeah, we had that problem too. The power went off and while the generator kicked on for the consulate building itself, the generator doesn't cover the recreation area. So our food people couldn't cook and we had a lull in food cooking and consumption for awhile.

I had several games lined up but they were all outside games and didn't translate well when played under a covered patio. I mean Red Rover just seems a little dangerous when children can skin their knees on concrete after busting through the locked arms. Finally the rain slacked off and instead of doing an orderly balloon toss game as I'd planned, Jimmy let the children have a free-for-all water balloon fight which they loved more than anything.


All was not lost, though. The sun finally came out, the children could swim, the electricity came back on, everybody ate and Mac had a great time. All's well that ends well. I'm glad that's checked off the to-do list!!