Whew!  I made it through my son's first 'official' birthday party where we had a bunch of kids (9, in fact) over to play games and celebrate for three hours.  Wow.  I'm not sure what I had in mind as to how it would turn out but it was WAY more work than I expected!  My son turned 6 so his friends that came ranged in ages from 4 to 6.  What made it difficult is that with those ages, attention spans vary greatly and so I found that the older ones wanted to continue doing the game that I had set out while the younger ones were bored and wanting to move on to the next thing on the agenda.  After the first hour I realized my error of telling the parents not to come back and get their kids for three hours!  :)

All in all it turned out good.  My son and all the kids had a great time and I kept them occupied up until the last 20 mins. before the parents got there.  They decided to have fun popping all the balloons and then have a competition of who could pick up the most balloon pieces!  Hey...as long as the mess gets cleaned up after, I'm all for it! :)