MsE's Birthday Party

We decided to try to throw a party for MsE's 6th birthday. It was our first party of the year, despite it being August and the 5th family member to have a birthday.

Don't judge us too hard - We've been allowed up to 5 visitors in the house for months now and Singapore has been hovering at 0 - 1 daily "Community Cases" for at least a week and generally very low for some time. Although we do have other categories of cases still being diagnosed daily, they're already in quarantine due to being close contacts of previously diagnosed COVID cases, so our risk in Singapore is pretty low.

We threw MsE's party outside beside the pool last year, but as we're still not allowed to go outside in groups larger than 5, that option was out. Instead we had the 4 girls over to the house that our girls play with almost every afternoon.

The night before the party, MsE went to Baskin Robins with just Jonathan and I and picked her ice cream cake. It was put in a box with dry ice for the walk home, because it's about 30 C out. The cake cost way too much, $35 for what we cut into 6 pieces. But ice cream in general is expensive here. The party girls were very impressed. Most of them had never had ice cream cake and wanted to know where it had been bought. We fed our dairy free family members "dairy free" chocolate dipped vanilla ice cream popsicles which we recently found.

I decided to portioned out all the snacks individually for the party. I put them in goodie bags on each girls plate. We had fun decorating the bags the day before and the party girls enjoyed digging through their bags and exclaiming over the treats they found. There were drink boxes, some candies, and mini cookies. We had 2 different types of chips they could choose from that an adult handed out, and fruit salad that we dished out from the kitchen.

After all that work, I almost forgot myself and let MsE blow out candles on the cake. Instead we showed the girls the cake, then cut it up, and had MsE blow out the candle on just her piece. Luckily I had a single number "6" candle, because even just that dwarfed the piece of cake. I think if I had put 6 candles on, they would have formed a ball of fire and melted the entire piece in seconds.

Party games included Nintendo Just Dance (with MsE using the only controller to keep it fair) - picture 7 girls all dancing along; Hide and Seek (which was the quietest moments of a party I've ever been to); and Pass the Parcel. The last one was probably a poor COVID choice: Lets all sit real close and touch the same thing over and over again. But, the requests for a pinata in the house had been turned down; we kept it for decoration.

The prize for Pass the Parcel was slime for everyone which I got from a great deal at Toys R Us. I quickly figured out why they were almost giving the Slime away. It was Farting Slime (it's actually marketed that way; I missed the fine print). I gave the 7 little girls slime that makes fart sounds as you squish it and then we all giggled hysterically for about 30 minutes.

And yes, MsE is like a foot shorter than all her party guests and 2 to 3 years younger too. But it's who she knows and they all love her.