Where are we as a society that some people think spending $5000 for a two year old's birthday is even okay? I am all for choices in parenting but what are we teaching our children with this?  

Perhaps I am supremely out of touch because I even object to "goody bags" for kids birthdays. Why is this now compulsory? When I was a kid (25 years ago) this was not a common practice. Maybe at a water themed party everyone might get a plastic squirt gun, but that was about it. I had a child actually ask me where the goody bags were before he even said hello at my daughter's 4th birthday. It was clear what he was there for... not that I blame HIM at all. I blame an increasingly goods/things/stuff materialstic society.

My daughter's birthday happens to be right before Christmas, so birthdays are always tricky for her, scheduling, sheer number of gifts in one month, not having Christmas decorations up. This year's birthday was also complicated by my severe early pregnancy morning sickness. I called off her big birthday bash with two days notice, it would have required us to drive to another county where most of our family lives. Instead, Hubby and I improvised an ice-cream cake tea party for Darling Girl and two friends from school.

Need I say our daughter had a blast? She and her two friends played all afternoon and then we hit a matinee for "Enchanted" totally spontaneously. It was a lovely stress-free day.

I compare it with her 4th birthday, when we still lived in town near a bunch of family and friends. We did go all out for that one, as we had a feeling it might be our last there. We had a backyard BBQ, hot dogs and baked beans, chips etc. We put a few bales of hay in the yard and called it a corral, and gave the kids (shudder) goody bags with cowboy themed items in them. The big surprise was having a pony come for pony rides, a real bargain I think, at $100 for 2 hours? It was awesome, the kids all loved it yadda, yadda, yadda.

I, on the other hand, was a total wreck! It was a simple family party, mostly pot-luck. My Mom made the cake, the cowboy trinkets came from the dollar store and a neighbor and her daughter assembled them into the bags for me. Even the horse was low-stress, it came, it played, it went back in the trailer.

But honestly, I don't think my daughter enjoyed one more than the other and really isn't that the point? The mother in this first piece says,

""I just thought, 'If I go to another paint-a-ceramic-bowl or stuff-a-bear party, I'll shoot myself,'"

Is it her enjoyment that matters? Can't she just throw her own party? Also, I catch more than a whiff of one-upmanship in a lot of the examples in these stories.

Meanwhile children are living in garbage dumps! Children are being sold in marriage to pedophiles in the middle east! AIDS orphans in Africa!

The pony-rides seem extremely selfish in retrospect.