As you may remember from earlier posts, it seems we have been celebrating or at least talking about Christopher's birthday for over a month! On Easter Sunday (March 23rd), we put candles on a cake and had a mini-joint-celebration for Hannah's, Christopher's and Pop's birthdays - mainly because my mom was in town. Then we had a 'family party' on his actual birthday (April 2nd), the same day John got into a car wreck. His 'friends party' was scheduled for Saturday, April 12th at our house, but had to be rescheduled because we had an unexpected family funeral to attend in Wichita Falls the same day. Having to reschedule the party was not necessarily a bad thing because it gave me more time to figure out what games or activities I could do for his party since I had originally planned to rent a bounce house as the primary party activity (that was nixed by the orthopedic doctor after Christopher broke his arm on April 5th).
We had no available Saturdays left in the month before we headed to Pennsylvania for our month-long vacation/sabbatical, so I decided to reschedule his party for Sunday, April 27th immediately following the worship service. Now, I had invited all the kids in his class (about 15 or so) to his Saturday party and usually just the kids his age with at least one parent attend the party. But since we had the party at the church right after worship, we invited the whole family of each of his classmates so that we could all eat lunch together, party and go home. I was just trying to simplify things...HA! It just so happens that 4 of the largest families in our church (each of which has 5 kids or more) have kids that are Christopher's age, and most of the other families (including our own) have 3+ kids. So out of the 12 families that were able to attend, we had a total of 74+ people at this bless-ed event! With that many people, the party is an instant success even without the grandest activities or increased expenses. I figured that whatever money we would have spent on a bounce house would roll over into pizza expenses. I baked and frosted my own cupcakes from scratch (96 of them!!!), brought watermelon, apples, and salad, made my own pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey out of felt that I bought at Walmart, and Martha (Nana) provided the piñ
Here is Sarah not wasting a crumb of that cupcake. I wish I had a picture of the 90+ cupcakes that were proudly displayed on the dessert table.
Here is my Walmart donkey creation. After hearing the weather forecast of rain and a cold front for Sunday (I thought we'd just do a picnic lunch outside and have the kids play on the church playground), I made a mad dash to Walmart to buy felt and fabric glue. The fabric glue didn't work, so I was up until 11pm Saturday night hand-sewing this thing together! Thankfully this traditional game was a huge success with all the kids!
I love this picture! The kids all erupt in laughter when the blindfold is removed to see where the donkey tail has been pinnned (or in this case, velcroed).
This is what you call organized chaos. I had the fun job of blindfolding the kids, spinning them round and round, then putting them in the direction of the donkey. There must have been about 40+ kids in line for this.
John was on piñ
Here begins the mad rush to gather the fallen candy...
After we came home and Christopher opened all of his presents, we happily declared the celebration of his 5th birthday OVER!
1 comment:
Oh Mindy! I didn't know that you had to sew the felt donkey game by hand!!!! You win the award for #1 MOM! I'm glad that everyone had a good time. I never knew they had that kind of pinata. Very cool.
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