Birthday Week {Sunday}

The rest of us have winter birthdays--December, January, February, and March-- so with Eli's birthday in the summer, we try to make it FUN! And he's the one that gets two parties, one for his friends and one with the family. Well, to be fair, I WAS going to let Hannah have some friends over for a tea party or something and let them all come in their dress-up clothes, but good friends of ours had just moved and I really couldn't think of many GIRL friends for her to have over for a morning!  Anyway... Eli gets two parties. We don't go crazy really.  I try to keep it simple and don't especially get into much with decorations and games. Living in the country, we like to set out a couple baby pools, the slip n slide, and some water guns.  What more do you need??  We tell the kids ahead of time to bring swimsuits, and from what I can tell, everyone has so much fun!  We throw in some cake and ice cream and birthday presents in there, and we have a birthday party!  

This year the party list kept growing and growing, and I was getting overwhelmed trying to figure out how to feed everyone a meal, and with it being county fair weekend in our town, instead I changed it from being a Saturday afternoon (or late morning) thing to a Sunday evening cake-n-ice cream only thing to "kick off Eli's birthday week". It ended up being great timing because his party was in the middle of our heat wave and earlier in the day would've been TOO HOT.  But by 6:30pm, the weather was PERFECT!  

Spiderman theme, per Eli's request. I can't ever get red OR black frosting color quite right and in trying to keep things simple, I decided to spend a little more on plates and cupcake decorations to make it easier...

The kids were either splashing in the pools, going wild on the slip n slide, or fighting over Eli's power wheels truck.  =)  A good time was had...

Several times when we'd be at the store, Eli would mention something about wanting a pinata. After enough times I made a mental note to look for one for his birthday this year.  Not that they're terribly expensive but we did tell him that this was his pinata year, we're not doing this EVERY year.  So here it is...

 It turned out that it's not a bat-at-it type of pinata. Rather, you have to pull the correct string to open the door for the candy to fall out. Never heard of that before but whatever.  Birthday Boy got to go first....

... and I don't know if he actually pulled the right string or the pinata just didn't work right, but the candy fell on the first try!!  I was pretty disappointed, very anti-climactic but the kids didn't care, they all raced to get the candy and fill their treat bags!

We played a little more and then said farewell to our friends!  What a fun evening and GREAT way to kick off Eli's birthday week!  Thank you all!!