Well, I get to practice what I preach today! I assure you this is a huge decision for me.
One of my favorite things is to plan birthday parties, and now that I have Jaidan I get to plan the parties exactly how I want them/think he would want them. We have made it a point that Christmas is about giving and helping others and demonstrating Christ’s love so birthdays I have deemed all about the birthday boy or girl. I like to go all out. For Jaidan’s 1st birthday we kept it pretty simple, but I still had lots of decorations. Water bottles with his own labels, cupcake toppers on super cute cupcakes. The theme was colors and shapes & the number 1.
His 2nd birthday party is to be extra awesome because he will be 2 and it will be his GOLDEN birthday! Golden birthday is when you are the same age as the date of your birthday. August 2nd is his birthday so age 2 is his Golden birthday. My birthday is September 8th and I had my golden birthday when I was 8. My mom did a carnival theme. We lived on a dead end circle driveway and my best friend, Tommy, shared the same birthdate and age as me. So his mom and my mom combined it and they had games/activites set up around the whole circle drive. They gave out tickets for each person to play the game/activity and had prizes too. I wish I had pictures to show from it but it was so much fun! All of my birthday parties were so unique/awesome and I remember them all! Back to Jaidan…
I envisioned Jaidan to also have a carnival theme. With ticket invitiations.
A ticket booth at the entrance…
An old popcorn machine…
with all the decorations like this adorable lemonade stand…
And look at this awesome photo booth!…
Doesn’t that look like fun?!?!
Here’s the thing…
We have the pototential to get rid of this debt by the end of the year! We have a 16500 left. The numbers don’t make sense, but I know God is greater than math and it COULD happen. So instead of going all out this year, I’ve decided to stick with our budget :O (that’s a shocked face) We will have $200 saved in his party envelope by the time of his party. I can use some of grocery envelope for the food part if needed. The party I wanted to throw was going to be at least $1000 by the time we hired the balloon artist ($150) face painter ($150) bounce house, cotton candy machine, popcorn machine, not to mention all the decorations that I would want. Some of you may think that’s outrageous but 1.)it’s a hobby 2.)birthdays are a big deal and 3.)I love doing it. PLUS, I’m an adult and I’m allowed to… IF I have an envelope for it. And this year I just wont have the $ for it in our envelope. What I really want to do is justify why I should just do it anyway… ‘but he will only have 1 golden birthday’, ‘he will only turn 2 once’, ‘but it’s his birthday and he deserves to have the best party’. But instead, here I am today practicing what I’ve been preaching and telling myself that we need to get out of our mess before we can go forward. So instead of the hyped up carnival party, this year we will be celebrating The Very Hungry Caterpillar style. Will it be more simple than a carnival? Yes. Will it be boring? No! Jaidan brings us the book countless times a day to read it to him, he loves it! It wont be exactly what I envisioned as far as the carvnial, but it will be perfect. And after the party I can be relieved that we are only months away from paying off debt. ((Plus, I know that he will be a little older next year to enjoy the bigger stuff even more. I know that so you don’t have to tell me! 🙂 ))
We are in a lifestyle change. We’ve changed the way we think about money, talk about money and spend our money. You can have nice things, but you have to pay cash. We can have nice parties, but we gotta have the cash. We have plans to have more kids and a bigger house and we want to be in a good position. Not that you have to have all the money in the world, but we don’t want to be in bondage to debt anymore. We are ready to move forward!
So August 6th, be ready to party with the Very Hungry Caterpillar at Jaidan’s 2nd Birthday party! 🙂
