Birthday Boy

We celebrated David's birthday quickly and quietly as a family the day before I flew out to Napa.

8

My beautiful family

We gave him a bow for his birthday and he has really taken an interest in it. I thought archery would be a good skill to know (in case of the zombie apocalypse) and also, it takes extreme caution and concentration - two things in which he needs experience.


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As I mentioned in the previous post, we were lucky enough to get a reprieve from actually having his party in between my trips because we weren't quite ready. Thank God for rain!

David wanted a "construction" themed party so I e-mailed invitations to a "Nailed It" themed party in the backyard knowing that an idea for the activity would come to us in time. Justin Time. (Hey, that might be a cool theme for next year!). Maybe I should have gone with the "Wing It" theme because that also happened. (That is also a good theme because my son definitely has an interest in aviation. In fact, I had hoped that he would want an "aviation" themed party because I could make that happen. Another time!)

When I was researching "construction" themed parties, most of the ideas that popped up were for much younger boys. Cute, but too young for this 7-8 year old group of boys. I thought it would be cool to build a deck and have the boys construct the walls, but after discussion with the hubs, that didn't sound so good (or safe if there were sugared up boys with multiple hammers). Then I thought maybe each boy could make a wooden keepsake or sign at the party to take home, but nothing ever solidified there either.

I was confident in the food spread having bought a big tub of cheeseballs and orange soda, knowing we'd have a veggie tray and something else (which ended up being lumpia!!). And I had gotten some small orange cones, some cheap yellow "hard" hats, a cake banner and a whole lot of caution tape.

Easy decor that can be used again and again...

I made a couple of signs for the occasion too, but decorations were really minimal.



For the activity, Scott came up with a great idea for the boys to construct a soap box derby car. So there weren't any nails used, just screws, so maybe we should have renamed the party "Screw It!"? (Ok, I'm done.) (But it would have worked!)



Most of the time it was Scott and a dad working on the assembly, but occasionally some of the boys helped.



And they were all anxious to drive the car.




After every boy had driven the car, we had cake and David opened gifts.  For the cake, I wanted to get all Pinteresty and do it up with the construction theme, but in the end, I went with a yellow butter cake that I had Emi gouge a hole into and frost with buttercream frosting from a container. Then we crumbled up a bag of Oreos to make the dirt topping. We used candy corn as caution cones and donned the cute banner I found at Hobby Lobby.

Blowing out the Candle

I set up an Ice Cream Soda Construction Zone that the kids seem to enjoy.



You can't see the yellow sign on the table but it looks like this:

One idea I came across that I did incorporate was the bubble gum measuring tape for the guests to take home.



We had pinion in the burn bowl and it was a perfect fall day to celebrate David. After the party, I decided to drive the derby car.

Note: I was in the minority that didn't crash.

Now we need to get cracking with Aubri's party ideas. She says she wants a Ninja Turtle party and we can certainly do that, but we will have to put some sort of spin on it for sure. Stay tuned to see how it pans out for us....