Better late than never??

I've been peeking on a few of the forums to find questions with no responses yet and I happened across yours! I hadn't seen it before. Based upon the date, I'm guessing that your little guy's birthday week has come and gone. Hopefully the excitement wasn't too much to bear and he is now just going about business as a five-year-old.

Although my little ones haven't yet reached this milestone yet (knowing something will be happening weeks before it comes), I did teach 1st grade and kindergarten for several years, so I can help a little with that age group. Mostly what we tried to do with exciting and highly anticipated events (field trips come to mind) is:
-have a calendar to count down to the big day. When they could SEE the event displayed on a calendar, it became more manageable to process. It wasn't a big nebulous exciting thing, it was a clearly defined time.
-giving the children some responsibility related to preparing for the event
-having a predictable, set time to discuss the event and then expecting kids to be on-task when attention is needed elsewhere (this was easier as a teacher than a mom, I think, since we had circle time in the morning for things like that. But breakfast time, for example, could easily become "circle time")
-creating some form of writing or artistic expression about the event (we created both class and individual books with their writing and drawing. Pre-writers could dictate their thoughts or story to an adult, who would write their words verbatim.) Again, this gave a concrete-ness to the event and allowed them to visit and re-visit their thoughts about the event. We'd do this again after the event to summarize what happened and what we wanted to remember.

Anyway - not sure if this will be helpful especially since the time has already passed. But maybe it will be helpful in the future. ;-)