Knowing that the children really don’t cope with busy, choatic, loud party scenarios when they are anxious we always have a celebration at home that allows them to still experience the “New Year thing”. So we set them challenge activity bags, or envelopes, a bit similar to our advent thing, but this time purely about the night.
So this is what we did this year too… we gave them an envelope, at midday, and inside was another envelope saying that they needed to decorate for a party, move the clock forward 3 hours and have lunch. The inner envelope contained all of their envelopes for the evening with the real time noted in red and the fake time noted in black. This meant they knew we weren’t lying to them, we knew they couldn’t stay up til midnight but we could pretend like when we go on holiday to a different time zone.
The order of events:`
12 midday (3pm) – set the clock forward 3 hours, lunch and decorate for a party (basically, put the christmas lights up).
1pm (4pm) – Present Exploration: Any new things they haven’t got to explore yet for Christmas can be checked out during this hour
2pm (5pm) – Games hour – board games, so the choices ended up being jenga, uno and draughts
3pm (6pm) – Gingerbread house – what family doesn’t enjoy the building a house out of ingredients that are tricky to hold together in a confined space right?
4pm (7pm) – Magic bath time (bath bombs… plural) – they love what Lush! products do to their bath water… so naturally as it’s NYE, we may as well double up right?
5pm (8pm) – Party clothes and face paints – as previously mentioned the children love any excuse to dress up fancy… but they also love face paints. Short time frame meant they just had NYE 2017, 3 balloons and 3 popping fireworks this year, but hey – we got back on track with our timings.
6pm (9pm) – Party Feast – exactly as it says on the tin… a feast of Party nature.
7pm (10pm) – Chocolate fountain – melted chocolate, strawberries and marshmallows. Mmmmmmm!
8pm (11pm) – Disco time – main lights off, christmas lights on, music and not plugged in microphones (and glow sticks of course)
9pm (midnight) – Midnight mocktails and countdown orange and pineapple juice with grenadine and a netflix NYE countdown
They had a lot of fun, some envelope challenges ran past the hour, but it didn’t matter. we still read the next one on time and muddled our way through. and ultimately ended the year on a high.
A Pleasant Chaos 