Party time...

My poor darling child has the unfortunate luck to be a December baby. So while everyone else is getting excited for Christmas, he is torn between Christmas merriment and his birthday. We have many interesting conversations were he asks Santa for something and I remind him that maybe – Santa doesn’t guarantee to get you EVERYTHING you want, so he then insists on getting it for his birthday. Trying to knock the sense of entitlement out of an ASD nearly 4 year old is hard! He can be very literal and if you tell him to be good and Santa will get you a gift that you ask for, well as you can bet he expects to be compensated for his good behaviour. We try to hold off on the Christmas tree and decorations until after his birthday but he wants to be like everyone else and have everything up. So December needless to say is one busy excitable month for us!

This year for his birthday party I decided to host a birthday lunch during the week. My husband is a shift worker and we could not make any weekends work leading up to Christmas and he unfortunately is working all the days surrounding my son’s birthday, so I thought a little lunch with his mates and their mums might be nice and easy. I am lucky to still be a part of a great mother’s group so my jem has lots of friends to play with today.

A challenge I have had preparing my little ASDer for this party is he is going through a stage of segregating his friends into groups. I suspect that this is a coping mechanism to help him to be comfortable in different environments. So in his mind his has his lion friends (mother’s group kids – don’t ask me where he got lion from) and his discover friends (day care). I of course invited everyone, as I didn’t want anyone to be left out. I have tried talking to him about merging both groups and after week of explanations and preparing he is sill adamant about separating them.

So multiple scenarios are going through my mind, most of which end in a meltdown. He is not an aggressive kid, so I don’t think he will lash out at his friends, but he is going through a funny stage of you are my friend, not their friend, so fingers crossed that everyone is happy and all friends by the end of day. I also have the slightly added stress of meeting some  of the mothers for the first time. Having been in their shoes I know how it feels, but I personally am such a bad host, I know I need to keep reminding myself to mingle. I have been spoilt in the past with a super husband and two great best friends who always check on the guests for me, as I can be quite shy. I’m doing this on my own today, so hopefully it will all work out.

Tips for the day are to keep it simple!!

The lunch is at a café so pre-ordered meals and a few sides will help keep the chaos down.

We chose a café with play equipment  - best idea ever!! Free entertainment!!

My son is still crazy about dinosaurs, so I stuck to this theme with the cake and a few decorations.

Helium balloons are a great way to make things look fancy, whilst not going over board and are cheap!

Large bubble wands will be heaps of fun for after lunch and at $1 each are great entertainment tool.

For the party favours, I visited our local toy shop and discovered a little car set that was reduced to $2 from $7. SCORE!! I jumped at the chance to do something other than lollie bags as my son tends to go nuts on lollies and spins out for ages afterwards. So look around, you never know when you might get lucky.

Last but not least I asked a friend whose little girl is one of my sons BFF’s to arrive early, hoping that the two of them playing will distract him from the merging of his two friend groups.

The challenges of a high intelligent ASDer!!

My attempt at the cake...