Jo Green

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By Jo Green - Mon 7th Jun 2010

 

It was our daughter's 3rd birthday at the weekend, and naturally we wanted to take advantage of our garden and the great weather we seem to be having at the moment, to throw a birthday party for her.

Whilst she has her fair share of English friends, we were mindful that the majority of her friends from nursery are Spanish and as such wanted to ensure that as many of them as possible were invited and made to feel as welcome as possible and pulled out all the stops to do this.

We ensured that we had printed off dozens of invitations (In Spanish and English, we dare not even attempt Valenciano) with a detailed map of how to find us, and, given that we live in the campo, led a trail of balloons from the main road to our finca. We handed out the invites into the children's backpacks and also ensured that the guys at the nursery knew to mention the birthday party to as many parents as possible that we hadn't been able to speak with, or those parents who we had been able to speak with, but didn't have a clue what we were saying to them (probobaly most of them).

We were a little apprehensive with regards to how many of her friends would turn up - we were confident that the English friends would all come, but obviously wanted to take advantage of this opportunity so she could socialise with her spanish friends before Nursery ends in a few more weeks, and before she starts school with them in September. Also a good chance for us to get some much needed practise with our shameful language skills.

We had already decided that we would throw a typical 'English' childrens party as opposed a 'Spanish' one - partly becuase we didn't understand what may be expected of Spanish party (other than the Piñata, which seems to be creeping into English culture aswell) and partly becuase we thought that it might be a change for the Niños.

It was nice to see that a number of children and parents made the effort to come and we did our best to make them feel welcome. The 10-foot Trampoline (Thankyou Asda) was a life-saver and the piñata wasn't missed. I was also pretty thankful that we had previously run a handfull of phrases and conversational peices through Google Translate before hand. Not to mention memorising the words to the obligatory 'Cumpleaños Feliz'.

And lets face it, the kids all knew each other pretty well from nursery and knew more Spanish than most of the parents - even if they didn't at three years old playing and ice-cream are internationally understood languages.