The unusual birthday party

My family is strange. No, really! I’m serious. Here’s a great example: Jeff’s birthday is coming up on the 16th, he’ll be 12. We asked him what he wanted, he named 2 games in particular. G2K had them (used, not as expensive) so I bought them yesterday and he didn’t leave Brittany’s room (where the PS2 is) all day ! Last night we were talking about his birthday again and we’re going to bake him a chocolate cake with hersheys and chocolate frosting… yum! and RICH! Good thing we got turtle tracks ice cream to go with it…

What’s so strange about that? Nothing. Here’s the odd part

He asked for a World of Warcraft birthday party. No, not a themed party with gifts and games… a party in-game. For those of you who aren’t familiar with games like World of Warcraft, they’re quite an experience. I consider them a chat room where you can enjoy chatting with people from around the world while playing a game at the same time You start by creating a character, which is a 3D representation of a cartoony-looking person (elf, human and a variety of other races). You use your mouse and keyboard to run around a wide variety of landscape killing monsters that give your character experience to level. Each level gives your character more abilities, spells to cast and such.

We’ve been playing WoW (World of Warcraft) for a little more than 4 years. It wasn’t our first MMO (Massively Multi-player Online game), we’ve played several others in the past. Jeff was so cute fighting nap time at 3 years old to try to stay awake and play Asheron’s Call (now’s the time I think about digging out old embarrassing pictures)

Because Patrick and I work from home and homeschool, we play WoW a minimum of 4-6 hours a day as a family. Not many families spend that much quality time together and I feel very blessed to have that! We have friends from all across the U.S., Canada and Australia. I also feel very blessed to have each and every one of them in our life. We’ve made some lasting friendships in games over the years and it’s an amazing experience.

Now that I’ve given you a general idea of what WoW is, I can continue with the birthday party plans In or near the major cities in WoW there are inns, taverns and even a fair. The fair is loads of fun and may just become a great creative writing project for Jeff soon! We have a family gaming blog if you’re interested in reading it: The Druid Family. I’ll explain that name some other time.

We’ll be having his birthday party one evening this week in one of the major cities in WoW. I’d wanted to have it at the fair so people could play games too, but this week the fair is moving to another city (one we can’t go to). So what about real life friends and family being there too? Weather.com is giving bad, cold, snowy weather all week… and they all have access to a WoW account They’ll be getting an invitation both via email and in-game mail system.

We will be serving gigantic feasts, small feasts and a variety of drinks along with delicious chocolate cake and ice cream from Shimmering Flats!

I’ll post pictures afterward so everyone who isn’t quite sure about my sanity can decide one way or the other