We Love You Party {For Abigail}

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that when our teens go through a patch of being unconfident or struggling with life, we like to throw them a ‘We Love You’ party.

If you’d like to see another ‘we love you party’, I have blogged about them before. However, I could only find one, which was the one we threw for Thomas during lockdown

Historically, all my children seem to go through a patch where they feel uncomfortable in their own skin. Sort of unsure of themselves and their place in the world.

So we throw a ‘We Love You’ Party! We love a ‘We Love You’ party in this house! I think maybe Lillie was the first child to have one. It was over a decade ago and we cut out huge ‘We Love You’ letters from scrap book paper and stuck them onto our wooden beams in our dining room. Three little words which mean so much to my children that they still will not let me take them down all these years later.

What To Include in a ‘We Love You’ Party

Consider the Needs of the Teen/Child

Each party has been curated with the specific teen in mind. Thomas had his over lockdown. He was struggling to sleep and was feeling anxious. So we focussed on that. We bought him natural supplements which helped with sleep, some Dead Sea bath salts, some noise cancelling ear phones and a weighted blanket.

For Abigail, I had overheard her talking with one of her friends. She was saying that many of her clothes were hand-me-downs from her sisters, which she was grateful for, but which were not helpful for her in finding her own style. So, with the input from family and friends, we ordered a heap of different clothes from Next, in all sorts of styles. The goal was for her to try on lots of different types of clothes and we’d send back everything she didn’t like.

In addition, Abs had started feeling some social anxiety. This began after she joined the army cadets. For the first year or so she was the only girl and was older than most of the boys there. Abs really enjoyed the actual cadets but struggled to make friends and was often left on her own. A couple of girls have since joined and she is loving it all now, but those months of feeling alone have definitely left their mark. So building her up was a very important part of this ‘We Love You’ party. We did this two ways – by creating a jar of all the things we loved about Abs and also making a video with all her friends leaving short messages of love and support.

100 Things We Love About You

We decorate a jar and write qualities we love about that person. Not only is this their favourite gift but the children keep their jars forever, even taking it with them when they move out.

Create One or Two personal Gifts

Our goal with this party was to build Abs up and remind her how precious she is to us all and that God made her exactly as she is and He rejoices in her Just. As. She. Is.

Abs reads for Great Britain, so we bought her a couple of book marks which we knew would last over the years:

Messages or Video Full of Love

Another lovely addition to the ‘We Love You’ party is a video or voice recording of the teen’s friends. For the first time, for Abigail, we had her friends film themselves sending her some love notes on video. Oh my goodness, their messages were so lovely and I think the resulting video was almost 30 minutes long. We all watched it after dinner, and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room. The whole video was so touching, mainly because it was so obvious just how loved she was.