Last week was one of the craziest of my life. I now know what it feels like to legitimately “go viral.” While I knew that Iris’ birthday party idea was a unique one, what I didn’t know was how much the world would care. On Friday night I blogged about her party, which was the day before, and by Saturday The Daily Dot had picked up the story. I hadn’t ever heard of The Daily Dot, but they had a good amount of followers on Facebook, so I thought that was pretty cool. Then with one email everything changed – it was from Buzzfeed. Wow. Buzzfeed? Now that I’ve heard of. The reporter said that she was interested in the story and left a few questions for me to answer. We were driving back from a wedding on Saturday night when I crafted my response and hit send.

On Sunday I received another email, this time from Tech Insider. I thought that was an interesting demographic, but whatever – I responded. I never heard back from Buzzfeed, so I thought that perhaps they changed their minds. It was just a story about a toddler birthday party after all… Wrong. On Monday things started to get a little crazy. I saw that a few places online picked it up and by mid-morning a friend alerted me to the Buzzfeed story. From there, the whole thing just took off. My Gmail inbox was flooded with requests from media outlets all over the world. I was honestly surprised at how many news organizations asked permission to post a story that was already publicly out there, but it was much appreciated. From our local news all the way to the UK, I responded as best as I could. This continued for a few days, but it all finally started to settle down as Friday rolled around. I tried to explain to Iris what was happening and I still don’t think she gets it. Since Iris has been plastered all over my Instagram since she was born, she’s used to people knowing who she is around town. I’ve been asked a lot of questions over the last week and a half, so I thought I’d sum it all up here.

What was the craziest thing that happened out of all of this?
The Buzzfeed story has been viewed over a million times. We were the sixth most popular story last week! To me that’s pretty dang crazy. We’ve also Skyped with a couple of major network television talk show producers. While I’m not hopeful anything will happen, it was definitely an interesting experience. In my next post I’ll talk about one of them… Cliff hanger alert!

Was this really Iris’ idea?
As mentioned in my pervious post, this was totally Iris’ idea. I only reached out to CVS after she chose her theme because, well, I didn’t know how I was going to pull it off. I sent a random email through the CVS website to tell them about the weird party my daughter wanted and to see if they wanted to help. I was genuinely surprised when I got a response back.

What did CVS think about it all?

I’ve been in contact with the company that handles their PR, but a person directly from CVS hasn’t reached out. I hope that they are happy with all of the unique press and not put off by any of the negative comments that we received.

Speaking of negativity, I guess now is the time to mention the pill bottles.

Apparently people feel very strongly about providing candy in pill bottles, but let me take this time once again to stress that we only gave them to the adults. This party was for our friends and their kids. In fact, there were probably more adults than kids there. And heck yes I provided alcohol to them and it was very much appreciated. If you drink and have ever been to a kid birthday party, you know what I’m talking about. I’ve read some pretty nasty things online about what kind of horrible mother I must be to have those things at my daughter’s party, but for every negative comment there were 100 positive ones. At the end of the day, Iris had a blast and her comments are the only ones I care about. Well, hers and Britney Freakin’ Spears:

So what’s next?
As crazy as things got last week, nothing actually changed. I did gain a ton more Instagram followers and made a few new connections, but that’s about it. We’ll still go to CVS weekly and as for her birthday party next year, we’ll just have to see wait and see what she requests.

Where all was it published?

I had a hard time keeping up with all the stories, so I tried to compile a list of the major ones, including a few video pieces (which were Iris’ favorites).

A few video stories:

The Today Show:
When Carson, Matt, and Savannah sit around and talk about a party you threw, it’s a big deal.

Inside Edition:

Making the local news all around the country – This one is in Philly!

Newsy (one of my fave videos, but it won’t let me embed)
Buzzfeed
The Huffington Post
TIME
Mashable
ET Online
ABC News
POPSUGAR Moms
Tech Insider
Cosmopolitan
Elite Daily
Bustle
MTV News
People
The Daily Mail
Mic
HLN

Thanks for joining us on this wild ride!