One good idea could be give downtime: It will be month before anything interesting happens unless you get in trouble by yourself. What do your characters do during the pause? This gives the thief the opportunity for picking pockets, the casters can develop spells, craft items, or do charity work; everyone can do some crafting or performing; so forth. If the thief goes pickpocketing, for example, make it interesting: One player plays a guard, another the intended target, third a competing thief, so forth. A nice mini-game/encounter to steal something nifty, but not overtly powerful. Ditto with the other characters: Develop a dramatic occurence related to their doings, give other players random npcs to play, and play it out.

I played a wizard, in 3.0, who took all the item creation feats I could. I never felt like I was holding up the party. I had lots of stuff I wanted to make so whenever we had down time I would pick something that fit how much time I had. Of course I never had enough cash to make really big items. In fact at the end of the campaign I was 45,000gp in debt to party members with all the crafting I did.