the blurry birthday bash

Finally I get to report on AJ’s big birthday bash!  I think it was pretty successful and rather well balanced in the effort vs. effectiveness arena.  Just to make that point and for your entertainment, I'll include some of my imaginings that got nixed too.

The theme was Knights, Dragons & Castles per his request and we all dressed accordingly.  The night before, in less than a half hour, M and I slapped together a cardboard castle to set the stage.  (In contrast, I think we labored into the ridiculously wee hours of the morning making a cardboard castle for S's 4th birthday party.  We are getting better at this stuff!)

 

We invited the 3 little guests plus their families since we were having it on a Monday night.  As they arrived we gave the 3 little guests and the birthday boy each a cape (the easy peasy ones I make out of adult sized t-shirts) with their first initial in a coat of arms on the back.  They turned out so cute!  I would like to say that I got a darling photo of the 4 of them wearing the capes, but we mostly got a bunch of really blurry photos of the excited little knights & princess.

While we were waiting for all the guests to arrive we had a tiara making station for anyone who didn't have one.  They were something like these that a friend blogged about awhile ago.  (thanks Jane!)  

The party really began with the royal feast.  I had been toying with the idea of serving a whole pig with an apple in its mouth and big gold goblets encrusted with jewels and only giving people knives to eat with and lighting the room with just torches.  But that was as far as I could get with the idea of a medieval banquet, which sounded like too much work, and so we went with KFC and homemade sides.  

Next we headed to the basement where everyone, including parents, were armed with a balloon sword.  The ensuing battle was EPIC!  The dads got right into thick of the fray and the moms were a mighty force to be reckoned with.  Every single photo is just a blur of balloons.  I couldn’t believe how long it held everyone’s interest and how few balloons popped and how few tears were shed.

Before the party, M crafted plastic spoon catapults for everyone.  S helped draw a dignity of paper dragons and set them up on the book case as targets for our catapults.  At the party, we equipped everyone with a catapult and a baggie of marshmallows and J dressed up as an actual dragon to be a moving target and a voracious consumer of the projectiles.  This activity was a bit trickier than the balloon swords, but equally as fun once we abandoned aiming at the dragons and focused on barraging family members.

There was this one insane moment during the planning phase when I thought it would be fabulous to decorate the fireplace like a huge dragon head with the fire in its mouth.  Then we could have roasted the marshmallows over the dragon’s fire…luckily M was with me at this moment and we decided against it on the basis that I couldn’t think of anything to create the dragon head out of that wasn’t highly flammable.  It's so good to have a level head in the house!

The grand finale to the evening was the blue dragon cake.  I abandoned the cupcake sleeves, because (a) frankly, even with my fancy cutting gadget, they were a pain to make and (b) I got a cook book years ago with ideas for food with special effects and the time had come to use one of them.  I built the cake on a long flat box, there was a fat drinking straw that went from dragon’s nostril down through the cake, into the box, and into an air-tight deli meat container.  As everyone was getting sat down at the tables, we popped some dry ice and warm water in the container, sealed it up and the dragon started to shoot “smoke” out of his nose!!!  It was super exciting!  As we all know now from reading the Hobbit, dragons like to sit on their horde of treasure, so this one was nestled on a mound of gold foil covered chocolate coins and a couple of strands of gold beads.  The candles were coming out of its mouth and were the sparkler kind.  That actually freaked Atticus out a bit and I ended up blowing them out for him.

I was so excited to serve the cake, that I never took a good clear photo of it to detail it's construction for you.  The eye & fangs were white chocolate.  The spikes and wings were too, only for them I dyed the chocolate blue.  I did take a short video clip of my test run of the "smoke" effect earlier in the day, but the fangs weren't on yet and I never panned out enough to show the whole cake.  Such a bummer.

Atticus was so excited by all his gifts.  I made him some shiny gold armor and a gold sword and a little name book because he has wanted to keep every book that we have sent to babies.

S gave him his own scissors, drew him some coloring books and drew him a darling bunch of robots that we ironed on to a t-shirt.  (AJ loves robots & calls them “raybots” which we think is adorable.)

J gave him J’s own tricycle which AJ has always coveted and a super cool shark helmet.

His friends gave him a sword and shield set, gardening gloves, a dry erase crayon set, some very cute stickers with AJ's face peeking out of knights’ helmets and last but not least a coonskin cap & flashlight.  He really digs the coonskin cap and likes to wear it outside and tells me he’s going on a bear hunt.  He calls it his “yakoon cap”.  So funny!

 We love this kid to pieces and it was so much fun to celebrate him!!!!