Blood and gore does not a good party make

We’re having a shindig for our middle boy next week, he turns five. Now I don’t know who he has been conversing with, I suspect perhaps J-Lo’s party planner – a woman familiar with big budget productions – but the child wants a dinosaur party complete with a seven foot volcano with dry ice and smoke. He wants a life-like dinosaur with a motion sensor (that’s on sale at the toy shop for a mere £450). And he has also demanded, I mean requested, that we construct an elaborate dinosaur bone yard in the back yard and kit all his mates out as palaeontologists.
What the boy wants and what the child gets will probably be two completely different things.
The child will get a few balloons, a dinosaur card and a cake that I burnt down the kitchen to bake. We can’t break with tradition.
Regular readers will know that in reality I go all out for my kid’s birthday parties. None of this hour in the adventure centre and cake for my lads. Oh no. It’s three weeks of hard core stressing over what other mas will think of my house, 30 screaming kids, kitchens on fire, kamikaze-related bouncy castle injuries, permanently painted limbs and mental trauma caused by discovering doggy graves in neighbouring gardens. That and the twice-annual threat of divorce over the husband’s glaring lack of artistic skills and enthusiasm for 4-year-old birthday party planning.
Case number one – the oldest boy’s last race car themed birthday when 10 minutes before the party started the husband displayed a startlingly lack of preparation and indeed thought by taping three bin bags to the living room floor, drawing a chalk line down the middle and calling it a race track.
Case number two – the time he stapled (a skill, by the by, he does not excel in) crisp boxes together and told a crowd of 4-year-olds they were racecars. Maybe had I slipped a bottle of whiskey into their birthday punch drinks they might well have believed him. From where I, and the kids stood, they looked like badly stapled crisp boxes. I think the word one of the children used was, and I quote, ‘super cr*p’.
They are still talking about it in the playground. I think most of the time parents just bring their kids along just to see what hilarity ensued when I let the husband loose unsupervised with a pair of jaggy-edge scissors.
I will not stand idly by as my reputation as a fantabulous party organiser is ripped to shreds by lack of artistic flair or an ‘it’ll do’ attitude.
The husband was this week taken off planning duties when he suggested that we compliment the dinosaur theme by splashing fake blood on the walls and put the ‘man getting eaten by T-Rex on the toilet’ scene from Jurassic Park 1 on loop on a big screen in the kitchen.
This party will be the stuff of legends, for all the right reasons this time…