Michelle Duggar on Celebrating Birthdays for 19 Kids

FAMILY MATTERS on 12.06.13

Michelle Duggar19 Kids and CountingBIO

 

Photo: DCL

Question from a "19 Kids and Counting" fan on Facebook: How do you celebrate the kids’ birthdays, especially when you have multiple birthdays in the same month?

It’s quite interesting because we have a lot of birthdays, especially during the months of December and January when we have Jana, John-David, Jinger, Joseph, Jedidiah, Jeremiah, Jordyn and Josie.

Initially, when they were all little, we would do a party for each child and invite our family and friends. But now since the family is so big, we’d be wearing out our family by doing that every time there was another birthday. We decided to make the birthday celebrations more personal for each one of the kids.

Now each child gets to have a special birthday lunch with just mom and dad. If it’s a younger one, we’ll usually invite their older buddy, too. For the older ones, it might be just dad and me so they get a chance to just spend quality time talking and having a nice lunch.

They get to pick their favorite restaurant; as you can imagine it’s a much different choice of lunch spot for the younger ones versus the older ones. The older ones like to go to a really nice place, sit down and just have a quiet visit, whereas the younger ones want to go to someplace like Chuck E. Cheese and play games.

We also have a tradition that if we’re not travelling on their birthdate, we always have an ice cream social at 7 p.m. in our house. It’s just a family thing, not a giant party, just family. I have some kids who are social butterflies and some that aren’t, so we’ll let the birthday person decide if they want to invite their friends over, they’re welcome to do that for the ice cream party.

That week of their birthday is a fun time where they’re just hanging out doing things that are out of the normal, running around with dad or mom and getting to have some special time during that week. We really enjoy that special time with them, celebrating each one on their own.

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