Hi

Just wondering what all of you do...

DD will be 4 in September, she gets her fair share of birthday party invitations from children in her class at Kindergarten, and although it's over 2 months off already lists people she wants to invite to her party - mainly from her class and neighbour children from our village (all German speaking only - well or Bavarian speaking lol).

The complication is that she also has 2 "English speaking" friends from quite a distance away - although in truth both speak German too, one very well, the other not so well but she does manage in a German Kindergarten (not the same one as DD) with a bit of extra tutoring... Unlike the local friends she has chosen for herself, I kind of acquired these friends for her as they are older siblings of tots from DS's toddlers group lol but she has known them a while and we drive 45mins each way to socialise regularly with them as I want her to have Eng speaking friends (and after 2 years here we have finally found these 2 really nice families with kids of similar ages who we would actually be friends with in a more natural environment where you don't gravitate to people purely because they speak your mother tongue lol).

The 2 Eng speaking friends know each other well but have never met DD's local friends.

DD has just been invited to the birthday party of one of the Eng speaking friends and so I am guessing she will be to the other's next month too...

Kids around here almost without exception have relatively small birthday parties with a max of about 8 guests, always at their own home.

So...

Would you mix the local friends with the Eng speaking friends from further afield? Having 2 parties isn't really an option for a few reasons including the fact DS's birthday is the day after hers AND I have to provide cake for KiGa to hold a tiny celebration there too - so far too many cakes and parties already for 1 week lol.

Final complication is that the 4th and older birthday parties she has been to have all been ones where parents just drop their kids off, but the Eng speaking friends live too far away for that really, plus have siblings who I suspect will accompany them...

This minefield hadn't occurred to me as last year we hadn't yet got to know these Eng speaking friends, and mums stayed at 3rd birthday parties ... her brother will only turn 2 and I think he'll just have a party at each of the toddler groups he attends.

Sorry for the waffle, was wondering what others do about mixing friends from different "worlds" lol

:o) Hilary, Anna (nearly 4) and Erik (nearly 2)

Hi Hilary

Don't you just hate organising kids' birthday parties :o) Summer's is in September too and will have to start deciding soon what I'm going to do for it.

Anyway I personally would go ahead and invite all the kids to the one party - kids are pretty amazing and mix and basically get on with it. Added fact that it's a party is bound to bring them all together! I think they'll enjoy meeting other children and it'll all be just fine!

You're a brave lady having the party at home - some of Summer's kinder friends have too this year but don't think I can handle goodness knows how many 5 year olds trashing the house!

Good luck

Dawn
xxx

I would mix the groups of children, since there will be more than one of each, so in the worst case scenario they could play in two groups...

My daughter (also 4) goes to an English speaking school in Amsterdam, where most of the children are at least bilingual or trilingual. The children typically have a few friends from their neighbourhoods who speak only Dutch. We've been to a number of birthday parties this year where monolingual Dutch children were mixed with children who speak English plus their native languages and it worked ok. A couple of times the Dutch children played separately from the others, but in most cases the children who spoke fluent Dutch and English (like mine) acted as interpreters and they all played together. The birthday children's parents would make sure they used both languages, sang happy birthday in Dutch and English etc In fact since the school children speak so many other languages we could hear bits of Italian/Japanese/Spanish/German/Hebrew/... being spoken between siblings and their friends, and it didn't seem to bother the other children.

I agree you should just invite everyone to the one do.....Im sure the parents will be fine just hanging around, watching the kids play and the kids will have no issues.

I have a similar story about mixing languages...my parents had a Chinese lady board with them before i was born so she's now like a sister. There was one occasion I was at her house for a party and she had family over from China. I played on the computer with a boy who was a few years younger than me and spoke NO English.....and we had a blast.....!

Language did not matter.

I personally love to mix up my friends and have all sorts of people in my house at the same time from all different backgrounds and so on. Its fun to watch the dynamics and see who talks to who.

Let us know what happens?

JAne x