The party dilemma

“New York children grow up and have birthdays just as children do everywhere...but not quite. Forget Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Hide and Go Seek. Today’s most popular party game is Can You Top This? – with both parents and children as participating players. “Janie has a clown for her birthday, I want a clown that does magic tricks,” says one knowledgeable 4-year-old. Her mother complains, “The magician’s been done to death. We’ve got to find something new, something the children aren’t tired of, this year. This problem at age 4. And the parties get bigger, if not better than ever.”

Sound familiar? I've certainly heard parents saying similar things about parties here in Melbourne.

What may surprise you is that the above quote comes from an article written in 1969. (“The Party-Go-Round” by Claire Berman, New York magazine, 19 May 1969.)

While I imagined that the sixties were a time of pass-the-parcel and musical chairs at home, it seems (in New York at least) the party-go-round had already begun.

We recently celebrated my oldest daughter's 12th birthday at home with a group of 14 of her (girl) friends. By twelve, it seems they've done it all when it comes to parties - iceskating, theme parks, reptile shows, crazy hair, nail bars, fairy shops, even Gold Class movies...

So we fell-back on a bit of homegrown fun. We organised a 'reality team challenge' party - based on some of my daughter's favourite reality TV shows.

Four team challenges in four hours. Essentially, what they were doing was old-fashioned games and competition, just with an updated theme. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of preparation work.

And this, I think, is how the party-go-round began. With parents increasingly time-poor, there just aren't the hours in the day to prepare games, bake food, make party bags and clean up afterwards.

Outsourcing the party looks a very attractive option. But with a limited number of entertainers and options, it does become a case of 'what's the next big thing?"

My youngest daughter has been to three parties this year with the same reptile show. It was great the first time, but even five year olds start to tire of the same old snakes on their shoulders and frogs on their heads.

It's very easy to say that all kids want is a pass-the-parcel, some fairy bread and a balloon to take home, but even the simplest of parties takes a good deal of organisation and preparation and with many families struggling to fit everything into their lives already, that may be just a parcel and a balloon too much.

Outsourcing or home-grown? What do you think?

How many phone numbers do you remember?

In a recent article* about the impact of technology one technophobe declared she hardly used any of the functions on her mobile and doesn’t even put phone numbers in the electronic contact list. “I remember them all.  All I want to know about is the green ‘on’ button”.

Wow, yes, I remember keeping loads of phone numbers in my head.  I was good at it.  I topped my year in Geography once because I memorised all the essential facts about Australia such as circumference, area, distances and so forth as if they were telephone numbers.  Now I store telephone numbers in my electronic contact lists and in the case of a small number of close friends – on a post-it on my desk.

Phone numbers are always at hand so why bother to memorise them? I rarely even ask for a phone number because in most cases it comes up on my phone display and I can store the number from there.

Having an aid to remember phone numbers is not new.

The first Rolodexes appeared in the early 1930s

And I bet many of you had one of these, way back when.  Perhaps you still do...

When you use a Rolodex or Teledex you look at the number while you dial.   Do that enough and you’ll commit that number to memory, without even realising it.  Use your phone contact list or your speed dial and you miss that step.  You may never memorise numbers outside those you absolutely have to. 

Some research shows that our ability to remember things is decreasing as technology increasingly takes on that role.  With the vast increase in information available technology provides the means for us to sort and categorise the data and enables us to recall (electronically) than ever before. But then we lose our mobile, or our hard disk crashes and we feel empty, like our very life has been taken away.  Perhaps we wouldn’t feel that way if we were sure that the computer that stays with us 24/7, our brain, was able to recall everything that was important to us.

In my younger years I could remember the phone numbers of all my close friends, my extended family, the school, the doctor, the dentist, the beautician, the pizza joint in Nedlands and later the work numbers of many of my colleagues.  Today I couldn’t tell you my own work number.

I’m off to memorise a few phone numbers. How many can you remember?

 

*Australian Vogue (I know, of all the places!), November 2009 p. 146