21 May Ideas for Planning an Affordable Birthday Party for Your Kid

Birthday parties can be one of the highlights of a child’s life.  A fun, exciting birthday party is an opportunity to hang out with friends and have unique, exciting experiences.  However, there’s been a bit of an arms race in the parenting community, with bigger and bigger birthday bashes becoming the standard.

You don’t have to spend big bucks to have a great birthday celebration.  An at-home birthday party can be a great way to celebrate your child’s special day without breaking your budget.  Here are some ideas for holding a great celebration for a reasonable amount of money.

Home Excitement

Renting a room at a pizza parlor or trampoline center or arcade can make planning easier – especially if food is provided.  However, there’s no reason you can’t transform your own home into a fun birthday venue.  For cold weather birthdays, clear out a living room or basement, moving furniture to one side or another, to create an area for fun and games – open space can be used to great effect for a variety of party games, and you can have cake and ice cream picnic-style on the floor.  For warmer weather birthdays, a trip to the backyard or local park is even better, allowing for more room to spread out and play in fresh air and sunshine.

Invitations

Rather than using store-bought invitations, create your own!  You don’t need to be a computer whiz to make great-looking invitations; many online resources exist to help you even if you’re creatively challenged.  SmileBox allows you to create great animated e-mail invitations, complete with personalized photos, videos, text or music.  You can also print out static versions and mail them the old fashioned way.  Alternatively, free image editing sites like PicMonkey can allow you to edit and touch-up photos for a personalized invitation.

Food

Feeding a hungry birthday party can be quite expensive – ordering pizzas to feed 12 hungry six-year-olds can be quite an endeavor!  Instead, consider fun food from home.  Allowing the kids to assemble food themselves is a fun option, and a pasta bar might be one way of doing that.  Cook up a few boxes of your child’s favorite pasta before the party, and have toppings – butter, sauce, meatballs – ready to go.  Kids can customize their own pasta dish; a tasty and cost-effective meal!