As an au pair, I shouldn’t have been excited about the almost-five-year old who I take care of five days a week inviting 9 other loud, giggling, rule-breaking five-year-olds over to our not-so-gigantic house to eat lots of sugar and be crazy for three hours, but I really was! Prune’s actual birthday is February 22nd, but since she will be off skiing that week, we decided to have her birthday party a week early and that meant my participation was both welcome and extremely necessary. I knew what I was walking into hahah and I knew it would probably be a nightmare. Cecile and I agreed that while we couldn’t wait for the party to start, we would be even more excited for them to leave afterwards, and boy was that true!
This was the first birthday party Prune had ever had, which meant it was also the first birthday party Fred and Cecile had ever thrown for their daughter. They wanted it to be amazing because they love her a lot, of course, and they did their absolute best. Cecile spent months coming up with a treasure hunt that the kids would split into either Fred’s group or my group for and then go through a bunch of obstacles before they were led to the treasure! Cecile made sure to explain the whole thing many times to Fred and me so that we would be able to think clearly as we each attempted to keep five children focused on a treasure hunt in a house filled with toys and sugar, and Cecile acted as sort of a game-keeper who floated between the two groups and set up all the activities! She gave all of us (Herself, Fred, Eden, and me) blue and white striped shirts to look like sailors, too!
On Friday night, Fred, Cecile, and I stayed up late blowing up a million balloons and trying to get as much as we could ready for the next day. It was a lot of work, but we were so happy to do it! We wanted the party to be awesome and we reallly thought it would be! That kept our spirits up and made the work exciting! :D
Before the kids arrived, we spent the morning decorating the house and getting the snacks ready. The snacks were mostly my job, for I told Cecile that I could make cake pops which I THOUGHT would be super easy hahah. Noooope. If Fred hadn’t jumped in and helped me out, I don’t know what I would have done! Everything went wrong with those cake pops. First, we messed up the dye so instead of a nice pink they ended up kind of grey… Then, we couldn’t get the coating right so some of them were wayyyy too thick and some of the coatings were just super runny and THEN a bunch of them wouldn’t stay up on the stick hahah. I don’t know how, but by some miracle, exactly 10 cake pops turned out to be pretty and presentable, and that was the exact number of party guests!
When the first four kids arrived, I couldn’t help but think “oh no, this is a lot of children and they keep running around and OH THIS ISN’T EVEN HALF OF THEM!” As more and more children arrived, the house just got noisier and noisier, but the good thing was that that meant the children were having a good time! When everyone arrived, Cecile gathered them on the couch and began an introduction to the treasure hunt which she read from an “old paper” that Cecile had asked me to burn the edges of so that it would look authentic. To say the least, I made the paper a little too authentic-looking. I burnt a big whole in it and for a few seconds I thought I was going to burn the house down (becuase I was doing it in my bathroom with the window open so that the house wouldn’t smell like smoke and I couldn’t go outside becuase it was pouring rain) when I couldn’t seem to put out the fire I had set to that paper. Nobody was mad at me though, and apparently I only burnt off three words! Cecile’s introduction was super entertaining! She read in her scariest voice possible about how there was a lost treasure that nobody had ever been able to find, but if the kids could work together and defeat the obstacles, they would be the heros of the treasure! She said they had to be brave enough to explore deep waters and not be afraid to make “all the heads fall” and that they would have to encounter a great beast! The kids were super into it hahah.
We all headed down to the bottom floor where the room was filled with balloons. The kids had to go around popping the balloons to find the balloons that had the clues in them. Other balloons were filled with pirate tattoos (which the kids LOVED). A few of the kids hated the noise at first, but after a few minutes they just got used to it. When all the balloons had been popped, we went back up stairs to draw straws for the teams and read the clues. We had agreed that I would be on whichever team Prune was on so that if I didn’t know how to say something, she could translate for me hahah. She has gotten sooo good at English! It is hard for me to talk to little kids in French becuase I never do it, but I got by okay during the party. My team’s clue said we needed to go fishing upstairs, so we went up to Fred’s office where an ocean had been set up and the kids used little make-shift fishing poles to grab little presents that were in the “water” which was a blue bedsheet. When they finished getting all the presents, they got to unwrap them and discover they had won little stamps and bouncy-balls and puzzles. In one of the presents, however, there was another clue that said it was time for us to go make the heads fall down. This clue took us downstairs to the laundry room where the kids had to use balls to knock down towers of cans that had princess and pirate heads printed on them. When the kids found knocked down all the heads, they discovered another clue, but they weren’t allowed to read it until they played two games!
That is when we went back to the livingroom and met up with the other team to comptete in sack races and ball-on-spoon races. The kids enjoyed the games, but they were anxious to find out what the treasure was! When they finished the games, Cecile read them the last clue which said that the treasure was at the foot of the tree! All the kids ran to the lamp in the second livingroom which is shaped like a tree, and there they found a black box filled with chocolate coins! All the other kids started grabbing chocolate, but Prune grabbed some weird object covered in tin foil from the box that nobody else seemed interested in. She unwrapped it, and inside was a note that said “congratulations, you have found the treasure! But, MWAHAHA, it is not the real treaure! You will find the key to the real treaure is being guarded by the beast!” The note was wrapped around a dog treat, and all the kids followed Prune as she ran over to Eden (our doggy) and gave her the treat and discovered that there was a key dangling around her neck! This part was cool because the other kids were scared of Eden so Prune looked like a total badass. With the key, they all ran up and began testing the doors upstairs, until finally they tried Prune’s room, and inside they found the big treasure box! Fred carried it down to the living room, and then Cecile distributed the contents. Inside there were paper and foam swords and tiaras and pirate masks and princess mirrors to be decorated! The kids were super stoked hahah.
We then headed over to to kitchen table, where we sang to Prune as she blew out candles that were stuck in macarons hahah. The kids sat at the table and ate goodies and candy. None of them liked my cake pops, but they said they were very pretty! Cecile told me she wanted cake pops in the first place because she didn’t think the kids would eat a cake if she got one, so it wasn’t that strange that they weren’t eating them.
After that little snack time, Prune got to open all her presents! While she did that, I helped clean up the snack table and bring out arts and crafts supplies so the kids could decorate the treasures they had won/found. They decorated their treasure for quite a while, and then spent the rest of the party running wild throughout the house and making noise!
Soon the parents began to arrive, and Fred and Cecile poured them glasses of champagne and offered them cake pops. Good news: the parents LOVED my cake pops! Hahaha. They said they were delicious. :D
By that time I was so tired. I just wanted to get into bed and take a nap, so after helping clean up a bit, I went into my room to lie down for a bit. I was exhausted!!! Fred and Cecile thanked me over and over again for all my help, and I assured them that it was my pleasure. I really wanted to be there for Prune’s party, and even though it was a crazy and difficult thing to manage, I am soooo glad I got to participate. After the party, Fred and Cecile had another party they had to go to, which meant I had to babysit the sugar-crazed almost-five-year-old and find a way to convince her it was bedtime hahah. Before they left for their party, Fred and Cecile told me that next year they would invite less children hahah and I could just hear my dad’s voice in my head saying “this is why I only let you invite six kids to your sixth birthday, and seven to your seventh” hahaha.
I really enjoyed getting to have that experience with my host family. It was so sweet watching them, as a young family, go through something like a birthday party together for the first time. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my Saturday any other way, which as I said before, is a ridiculous thing for an au pair to say!
Other than Prune’s party, the rest of this past week was pretty ordinary. I started running again on Monday, which was a terrible idea hahah. I couldn’t make it 2 minutes without coughing, but as the week went on, running became much easier! One morning before school, Olivia and I met up to get breakfast together. We went to a cute little cafe near my school and her house and got coffees and a pastry each. It was nice to see Olivia, since it had been weeks since I really got to talk to her. And the breakfast was really quite delicious! I’m still not over how adorable her accent is though, which makes me wonder if I ever will be hahaha.
The last thing really worth blogging about this week is that one day, I picked up Prune from school and she was wearing THIS:
And she looked like a little fisherman and it made me laugh a lot and I think she really liked that outfit because she wore it with so much confidence and it was just really cute hahaha.
I hope everyone has a good Valentine’s Day! Later today I am going to get some hot chocolate with Olivia and Maira I think, which will be a lovely way to spend my afternoon. :) Good bye!
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