So you thought that the horrors of your kids having parties started in their teens? Oh no... way way before that, try at about three. Years one and two are fine: grannies, granddads, aunties, uncles, a few bottles of cheap plonk and Bob's your kid’s party.  If you’re lucky, relatives will all be fairly well housetrained and shouldn’t be demanding games of pass the parcel or jelly and ice-cream. Year three is a different matter altogether, by now your three-year-old will most likely have a social network to rival that of your average media studies student and is probably twice the party animal, and all without the aid of artificial stimulants (unless you include sugar and e-numbers in that).  Hence you find yourself anxiously scouring the shelves of “toys r not a rip off honest” searching for paper plates, cups, hats, party bags, balloons.  

A kids' birthday party seems to be a far more serious affair now than it ever was in its 1970s heyday.  We products of the seventies were satisfied with one plate of butties, a bowl of jelly and a game of pass the parcel.  If you were really lucky there may even have been a game of “pin the tail on the donkey” (whereupon the unfortunate fat and/or ginger child inevitably ended up with a pin stuck on his or her bum).  Then off you were sent with a dried up piece of sponge cake. Parties now are scaled down versions of Elton John's shindigs, although fortunately you don’t have to invite the likes of Lulu and Dale Winton.

Party cakes are no longer a lovingly crafted home made Victoria sponge with a plastic figure of Noddy stuck on the top. No, either the local bakery has been hard at work with a team of ten sculpting the Tweenies from icing, or else several weeks before the big day you find yourself breaking into a sweat in the early hours of the morning, as you anticipate the baking of cakes as per the Jane Asher cake cook book your hubby bought you one year for Christmas (you seem to remember that was the Christmas you threatened to leave him to it to cook his own bloody turkey).  As you read through her book and gaze in astonishment at her works of art you realise Jane Asher is truly a woman to be admired /pitied (delete at your own preference), whilst quickly dialling the local bakery with the other hand.

We’ve somehow all been lured into hosting these extravaganzas where we hire caterers (or rope in copious amounts of friends, aunties, neighbours), bouncy castles and magicians.  In my experience the kids are terrified of the magicians, one inevitably breaks something (bones/glasses/pet cat) on the castle and there is likely to be an outbreak of food poisoning from the catering.  

Speaking of the catering, by the time you’ve received instructions about Jessica’s allergy to wheat, Oliver’s aversion to dairy, Sophia’s vegan diet and India whose parents are fruitarians, well bugger it they can just bloody well go to McDonalds, they do veggie burgers don’t they? 

A word of warning too, even at this young age you’ll find that you may have to suffer gatecrashers: you may well encounter the mum who arrives and announces that she’s had to bring along the younger brother or sister to her eldest.  You realise this was a cunning plan on her behalf as she then waltzes off to her two hours of freedom sans enfants.  Meanwhile you are left to cope with the child from hell, as he snivels and sulks at being left and his elder brother gleefully ignores him.  When you realise he is terminally snotty and miserable you have slightly more sympathy for his mum’s ruthless tactics. 

In your pre-children days and in the glow of pregnancy you may have devoured many a childcare book, and having brought up your own you may think you’re pretty genned up on kids and their peculiar behaviours.  It’s a certainty that nothing will have prepared you for the ruthless little swines let loose in your very own home.  You find Child A determinedly downloading on your pc (and wiping out all your cookies in the process as they set up their own internet account, all this and they’re only 4), whilst Child B (whose mum is resolutely anti-computer games) is playing Doom on the Playstation.  These are the ones you can cope with.  The more challenging are playing psychological mind games, with cries of “I’m not your friend”, “Harvey, go and punch Jemima” “Your mum is smelly” and “Do you like Jessica? I don’t”.

When the party is finally, utterly, resolutely over and you feel you can at last relax, there is one final task to be carried out: getting them all to go home.   A sure fire tactic is to arm hubby with party bags, grab (another) gin and tonic, claim a migraine and disappear.  As hubby is faced with marauding hoards of kids you can be certain he’’ll speed them out of the door as fast as their tiny legs can carry them.

Then comes the eagerly anticipated grand opening of presents: whilst the baby Jesus may have been satisfied with a few sheep and some gold, frankincense and myrrh you’ll undoubtedly find that your very own little god or goddess is not quite so easily satisfied.  You thought your Tiny Tears was hi-tech because she weeed?   Dolls must now come with artificial intelligence, interactive programmes and millions of megs of ram (eh?), the magic milk disappearing bottle which was so fascinating in 1974 is no longer so magical to our kids of the 21st century.  You can’t help but cynically notice that all those BMW driving, Ghost clad, Toni and Guy bouffanted mums seem to have striven to find the least expensive present they possibly can, either that or they’re the new age types who only buy toys made from wood, bits of string and glue. 

Fast forward a couple of hours, you lie knackered on the sofa with your dear child on your knee crashed out, surrounded by pressies, exhausted by having had such a great day, you are aghast to find yourself thinking, “well that wasn’t so bad, I’d do it again next year”.