After 2.5 years of trying-to-conceive and being unsuccessful, our plan is to continue trying for the rest of this year and if nothing happens we are going to start looking into the process of adoption in 2025.
Because of all this, I've decided this year is going to be my YOLO (you only live once) year and one of the things I wanted to do was to go "all out" in throwing Kai a birthday party.
For this post, I'm making a money diaries for the birthday party. If you're not familiar with money diaries, it's basically people making a detailed description usually about how much they spent in one week. You can read them here.
For the party I booked a venue that was basically a glorified McDonald's play area with some extra areas set up for kids to play doctor, go grocery shopping, run a restaurant and their own home kitchen. It came with a private room for 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The number of estimated people ended up being 13 kids (not including 5 babies) and 21 adults.
The party schedule went as follows:
11:00pm Party started and we provided lunch
12:15pm Sang happy birthday, took some pictures and had cake.
12:45 pm Cleaned up and was out of the room. Kids had an extra hour of playtime
1:45pm Party ended
| Item | Cost | Notes |
| Venue | $385 | Includes admission for 13 kids + 20 adults (paid for 1 extra adult- $7) for 1.75 hours in room plus 1 more hour of playtime |
| Food | $95 | 10 lbs pork belly, 10 lbs chicken drumsticks, 5 lbs green beans, 2 dozen eggs, dried tofu, rice |
| Cake | $157 | Eggless cake for 20 people + $15 paw patrol toys + $15 tip |
| Drinks | $70 | Juice boxes + Izze + soda + coffee |
| Accessories | $90 | Decorations + invitations + utensils + signs |
| Balloons | $50 | Paw patrol + number 4 ballons |
Total: $847
Some things were paid for by Brian's parents but overall, it actually costed about $150 more than I had guessed
Originally I was planning on just doing pizza but then I wanted to cater from a Hawaiian BBQ place Brian loves. That made me super excited about having good food but they never really followed up on my emails. Plus one of the kids has an egg allergy so I thought maybe we should just cook our own food and I wouldn't have to worry about any food contamination. Brian's parents were going to be here so with a little bit of apprehension I decided we could handle it.
Brian's mom stewed the chicken wings/dried tofu and eggs (separately) on Friday during the day and we heated up the chicken Saturday morning.
The morning of I cooked the green beans while Brian took care of the rice and pork belly. There was a little bit of an issue with the rice not being cooked all the way (we did 8 cups in the instant pot) but he was able to save it by adding more water and running another round of rice cook setting.
In the end the food tasted delicious and was a big hit. Really happy we pulled it off.
The cake I ordered from a bakery in Bellevue that does egg-free and gluten-free cakes. I was on the hunt for both an egg-free and gluten-cake but apparently it's not possible to do both, only one or the other. I went with the egg-free because while the kid had a slight gluten-intolerance at least it wasn't an allergy.
The kid was so happy because this was the first time they could eat the cake with the rest of the kids. Their parents usually bring them a separate cake but it's still sad to feel left out from the rest of the kids. The cake looked beautiful and it was so worth it to me.
The balloons were a bit of a splurge and I didn't need to buy all the Paw Patrol utensils/decorations but I wanted to go with a theme that Kai had chosen.
Overall we all had a great time. Brian's sister and parents were there so we had a lot of people helping out with everything and the kids had so much fun.
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