in which there was a birthday...

I've been reprimanded about my delay in posting pictures from Abby and Grace's birthday party. So here it is!

Harland and I decided to throw an old fashioned home made party for the girls. We wanted to see if we could do it for about the same we spent on Chuck E. Cheese last year (which was LAME). Did we succeed? Almost. A last minute addition of a pirate costume for Harland put us over what we spent last year, but anyone who was there would agree it was completely worth it! The girls asked for a fairy party, being into Tinkerbell, but we knew that wasn't going to fly with their little boyfriends, so it turned into a pirate and fairy party. The point being to defeat Captain Hook, who'd taken over our backyard.

The kids arrived and received fairy wings (for the girls) or inflatable swords and an eye patch (for the boys...and quite a few of the girls, actually!)

Harland made the party leading the kids through the games as Captain Daddy (named by the girls).

He was awesome!  He definitely gets a father of the year nod from me!

He made treasure maps of the backyard showing the way through each game:

1st: Pin the Wings on Tink.

2nd: Freeze Dance to Pirate music. 

3rd: A boys vs. girls relay race in cardboard pirate and leaf boats to save animals (girls) and money bags (boys).

4th: Sink the oragami pirate ships.

5th: Shoot the pirates (paper grocery bags with pirates drawn on them) off the fence with a "canon" aka, our nerf gun.  Can you tell which kids have experience with nerf guns?

Abby

Madison (Family)

Devon (Friend from school)

Jack (Friend from school..can you tell we gave him this gun for his birthday???)

Gabriel (Family)

Alyssa (Friend from school...Her Mom's a marine)

6th: To the treasure (a treasure chest pinata filled with candy and gold coins).

Gabriel cheated!

Grace's favorite friend from school...

The loot!

Arrrrggghhh!

We headed inside for cupcakes which the kids could choose to have fairy wings or skull and bones sprinkles on them (Harland made stencils of each). And then all the kids ran like crazy people with infatable swords on our front lawn.  Harland took a real beating during that.  The girls had so much fun, and that was the main object, so I guess we did ok.  Hmmm...guess we better start planning next year...