Maybe Having 8 AM Birthday Parties Is The Way To Go

There is a particularly kind of hell in figuring out when to have a birthday party for small children. Now that my kids are older, it’s easy and I have options. Mid-day to late afternoon gives everyone time to finish up little league sports, activities, church, and other common obligations in the morning and still get home at a reasonable hour. Evening parties are also totally fine since most tweens and teens aren’t going to melt down if they’re out until 8 or 9 at night.

But with toddlers there’s a million considerations. Nap times, meal times, overstimulation, and the fact that most of them have been up since sunrise can complicate matters. Kelsey Lucas, who runs the Instagram account Motherspeak , recently shared her solution to the issue: 8 a.m. birthday parties.

I’ll admit, I was immediately skeptical. Maybe I’m just too far out of the toddler years to imagine waking up early enough to be somewhere by 8 a.m. on a Saturday. But apparently this leeriness was overshadowed by enthusiasm. “Aside from our one friend who is not a morning person and said an 8 am party was ‘diabolical,’ the feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” Lucas says.

“I was nervous, but here’s why it works,” she writes in the caption. “After throwing big, afternoon birthday bashes for the past three years and always feeling so stressed, I decided to try something different. ‘Come join us for a birthday breakfast from 8am to 12pm.’”

She figured, since parents of young children are often up “at the crack of dawn anyway,” it made sense to start early, but still worried what guests would think. Turns out, the reaction was positive:

“I immediately got so many texts that said, ‘This is brilliant!’ and ‘I’m stealing this idea!’”

Lucas credits the success of this approach to a number of factors: kids are already awake, but not yet overtired. (Seriously, when you wake up at 5 a.m., you’ve already done a full workday by noon!) Moreover, leaving by 12 generally means you can remain on track for nap time. There’s also the matter of breakfast: it’s way easier to prepare bagels and donuts and fruit than trying to figure out something everyone is going to like for lunch. And for those summer birthdays, an 8 a.m. start time gets the fun started (and ended) before the worst heat of the day.

“We also let our guests know that they were welcome to stop by any time within the window, so we didn’t have everyone there for the entire time,” she continues. Honestly, this feels clutch to me: seeing a party as “visiting hours” more than an appointment time is going to be so helpful to families.

Folks in her comments were, largely, on board with the idea. Many had had morning parties of their own. (Though few started as early as 8 a.m.)

“We did a 9am-12pm brunch birthday for my daughter when she turned 6,” writes one commenter. “Her dad took her out to buy donuts and came back to a surprise. Bounce house set up, all her friends and their parents in pjs. It was actually the best! We did iced coffee bar, OJ, breakfast burritos cut in half from the local taco shop, fruit and donuts, and a giant donut cake.”

“Honestly, I would love this so much,” says another. “And you gave a wide range of time so whoever isn’t a morning person could show up at 11! It was probably way easier to visit with people too because instead of having everyone at the same time for 90 minutes to 2 hours people probably floated in and out.”

“Can we start doing this for adult parties, too? And concerts?” joked another. “Everything starts too late for my liking.”

OK, calm down, ma’am: some of us have teenagers and don’t have to be morning people anymore. Still, it just goes to show that you don’t have to do things the way everyone else does if it doesn’t work for you. Not only that, there’s a good chance there’s a whole lot of people who agree with you!