Our two-year-old has a more active social life than me and my husband.

While we're lucky to get invited to anything other than check-ups at the dentist, our daughter's diary is chock-a with parties and outings.

Most weekends we seem to be ironing her favourite dress and depositing her in a noisy play pit or a world of adventure for her to get covered in bruises and chocolate cake.

Or we're declining invitations on her behalf because she already has two other engagements to attend that day.

Next month is her third birthday and that means it's now our turn to plan the celebration of the year.

Eve has been talking about her birthday since before Christmas, which must indicate she's at that age when she'll start to remember the significant events in her life and will be traumatised forever if we don't make a big fuss.

The trouble is, I'm finding the whole organising thing a total headache.

Do we take her and a dozen of her little pals to a leisure centre, where a 90-minute party costs about £8 per child?

Do we go to one of those restaurants with a ball pit and let them battle it out with the bigger kids?

Do we hire a hall and run ourselves ragged supervising games and mopping up accidents?

And then there are the party bags, the prizes for winning, the prizes for losing . . .

I wonder when children's parties became such major, costly events.

I can't remember anything about any of my birthdays until I was eight and got to play a bridesmaid for real at my aunt's wedding.

Even though I wasn't the focus of attention, it felt VERY special.

In fact, I'm sure birthday treats didn't start until you were about this age. And even then, they were rare.

I went to Streatham ice-rink with my best friend Rhona and four others when she was eight.

This must have been an extravagant outing by anyone's standards in those days. But I don't recall being totally happy about it.

Rhona was a member of the skating club and had lovely white boots while I had to hire horrible black ones that made my heels go numb.

And while she got to show off doing pretty pirouettes in the middle of the rink, I was tottering unsteadily around the edge with all the grace of a Thunderbirds puppet.

Most parties, I seem to recall, were held at people's houses and followed the regular formula of pass the parcel, musical bumps, blind man's buff and as much chemically-enhanced food as Sainsbury's could provide (we're talking 1970), so by the time the party ended you were ready to throw up in the back of your dad's Vauxhall Viva.

If you were lucky, you came away with a small balloon that had deflated before bed-time and a piece of soggy sponge cake that not even the dog would eat.

You wouldn't find today's youngsters being thrilled about going to a party at someone's home these days - unless they happened to live in a bouncy castle.