New-fangled Birthday Parties
By v chopra
New-fangled Parties

Uma contributes her opinion on the emerging trend of organized and catered parties, and reminisces about the good old days.

In a world of power-rangers, bay-blades and Barbie-dolls with all the latest fashion accessories, a child's parties have become an affair to reckon with. Last week, I took my five and a half year old daughter to a party, which was held at one of the exclusive clubs in Mumbai.

Parties today

As always, we were greeted with a DJ playing the latest Bollywood numbers, and a 20-something hostess who was getting the distracted kids to play the games, representing the company that specializes in organizing children parties. This party had a theme, which was fairly evident in everything from the invitations to the music to the games and to the back presents.

After some vigorous dancing to the latest music, where mothers were encouraged to join in, getting tattoos from the hired artists, bagging prize gifts, everyone was ready for the cut-the-cake time. A huge Barbie-doll cake was ushered in; clapping along with continuous filming of the moment was followed by a huge array of eats with something for the fussy and non-fussy eaters - young and old alike. The child's mother had invited all the children of the child's class. Some came and some didn't. It didn't matter who was absent, for neither the mother nor the child noticed!

Armed with return gifts that would put the original gift to shame, we departed two and a half hours later. I was left wondering. Where has the time gone when there were small parties at home?

The good old days

The father would put up the streamers, with the help of the excited child and his siblings. Everyone in the family helped blowing up balloons and pasting them on the walls. There were contests on who could blow the biggest balloons. Invitation cards with each child's name written out by the boy or girl were given a week earlier. The return gifts were tiny tokens of thanks and affection, and other parents

By: kuttu
i want a feed to connect forum and blog
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Discussion Forum RSS Feed downtime
[...] I just realized that the The Unofficial DreamHost Discussion Forum RSS Feed (what a name!) haven’t been updated since I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.4 three days ago (forgot to change my .htaccess). [...]
By: Ian Sealy
Sorry about the delay in replying. A very busy couple of weeks. I doubt that having a large feed is a problem, but I think that having two separate feeds would be best. That way people can just choose which one they prefer. Thanks for looking at this.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - Just realised that I misread your comment. Somehow I thought that you wanted a feed for each forum (category/board). Sorry! Ian, Josh - I've now experimented with a feed that includes all the posts' content. It works pretty well, and it's really nice to be able to read the entire post in a feedreader. The only problem is that the rss-file is around 150 kb. Is this too much? Would it be better to limit the feed to only last 24 hours (currently it contains last 48 hours), or to only include excerpts. Another option would be to keep the existing rss feed with headlines only and then have another full post feed as an alternative. I would really like to hear your opinion on this... Thanks.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Josh - I agree that it would be more useful, but it would also require that I requested and parsed every single post in the feed every time I regenerate the RSS file (every 5 minutes) or saved a copy of every post in a database. I might give it a try, but I won't promise anything...
By: Josh Santangelo
Seems to work fine, but it would be far more useful if the actual post content were included.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - I guess that would be possible. Let's wait a couple of days to see if there's any problems with the main feed. <del>If more people would like category specific feeds please say ai!</del>
By: Ian Sealy
Would it be possible to put each forum post's content in the feed?

invited to the party were actual friends, and not just acquaintances.

Eats were lovingly cooked by mothers and indulgent grandmothers, and not catered. I still remember the taste of delicious homemade chutney sandwiches melting in my mouth.

There were no professionals to organize the games. Our parents did it themselves. But then again, not every child's parties were something to look forward to. Some parties were fun, while other parties, where the parents were not as enthusiastic or capable of organizing fun games, were downright boring. However, it was all part and parcel of growing up in the good old days'.

After all the children left for their homes, came the best part - opening up the presents!

Although today's parties are also well planned and well organized, I would rather do my child's parties the old-fashioned way, so my child learns simple lessons about the importance of planning, develops a sense of participation and responsibility, and above all, values the importance of giving a personal touch to whatever we do in life.

Article Source: http://www.articlemap.com

Author is an expert in beauty and health related issues.

Get information on beauty tips, know more about New-fangled Parties