International Nesties
dulcemariamar1
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
@ How many people did you invite or going to invite to
your kid's 1st birthday party?
I saw a post, where people are saying they are inviting like 50+ people. Is this normal? I dont think I know 50 people.
Re: @ How many people did you invite or going to invite to
My parents. So, 2.
Our space is too small for more than that.
Probably 10 or 12 and then 2 other kiddos of about the same age. None of them were family since my family lives in the Netherlands still and DH's family (his mom and dad) just wouldn't be up for it (they're in their late 70s and early 80s and live about 2 hours away. The party was 1.5 to 2 hours which was perfect.
One of the ladies I work with has a granddaughter and when she turned 1 they had rented a big space and had over 100 people. That is just insane IMO. I also think party favors are crazy, I can see if the kids are older (like school age) but not this young.
For DD's 2nd Bday party I am tag teaming with my friend whose son is 4 days older than DD. Neither of us have family here (their family is in Argentina). We will probably have about 3 or 4 little ones and probably less than 20 people between the both of us and it will be in the backyard again for a couple of hours max.
I'm sitting down with a glass of wine after N's 1st birthday today!! We had just family at it - 4 grandparents, 4 aunts, 4 uncles and 3 cousins... And that was more than enough! Though her oldest cousin was supposed to be here too but had too much school work.
I baked this morning and ran around loads... Feet sore now...
Okay, I guess this makes sense when you think about the entire family coming to the party. Just curious, so you dont have to answer if you dont want to, but are they all close friends or do you feel like you had to invite them because you were invited to their parties?
It must be so expensive to buy a lot of gifts during the year for birthday parties. This question is for everyone, but do you think you will limit the number of parties your kid attends when are get older? I mean, if they get invited to the birthday party of every single classmate, will you have to buy a gift for each party?
We had 25, but that was mostly adults, including my parents who happened to be in town. Since we have no family here, it was our close friends, and not all of them even had kids yet.
For T's 3rd birthday party (it was just 2 weeks ago) we invited 60pple, and 40 came. The party was on a weekday morning and over 50% of the guests were kids, as each child came with one parent/carer, or sometimes 2 kids with one parent/carer (siblings). Everyone in T's nursery class has invited everyone else (20 kids in his class). Many of these kids will continue on to school together for a number of years, so as a parent I have enjoyed the opportunity to get to know other parents at these parties.
Re: gifts, some of the parents (myself included) have put "No gifts" on the invitations and indicated a charity to donate towards if people felt so inclined. We did the charity that supports the hospital unit that saved T's life when he had a rare life-threatening illness when he was 1. Some people will bring gifts anyway, which is fine. T had about 5 gifts to open so didn't seem to notice that most kids didn't bring gifts (he didn't open them at the party).
Oh and yes the party going can get $$, too! I just limit how much we spend on gifts. So far weve only gone to six maybe seven parties. For schoolmates I try to stay in the $15 range, I let him go up to $30 for his best friend. Once I found some Disney games on clearance so we gave those for three parties that we had back to back and got all three presents for under $20. You can do it for less if you find good deals like that. Also, I don't think everyone throws ap arty and then those that are over the summer don't feel the pressure to invite a whole class since school isn't even in session. That helps a bit.
We had 45 people show up to D's first birthday party. Most of them were IL's friends. If it were up to me, it would have been a small affair with 12 people max (including us), with one other child. That's what we're doing this year, a small party with just immediate family and his little friend J.
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We probably had 50-ish, maybe a little less. But that's the same number of people we have for most family parties, DD turning one or two was on par with the kind of parties my family throws for HS and college graduations, 1st communions, etc. I am related to a heck of a lot of people and they looooove parties.
Back in NYC, many of the parties we were invited to were either "no gifts, please" (which is what we did for DD's b-days for non-family) or gifts were a small affair- books, play-doh, something under $15. There are only a few very, very close friends' kids whom I spend more than that on for birthdays.
I have no idea what things will be like here in Paris. We haven't been invited to any parties yet.