A Superhero Birthday!

Joseph loves Superman and superheroes in general. (Except Buzz Lightyear. Hard to believe, but it's true . . . he has said multiple times that he's not cool anymore.) So it was pretty easy to pick a theme for his birthday party.

I've typically been someone who's shied away from elaborate birthday plans, at least in theory (though I had no track record of simple parties since this was the first I'd ever thrown). I knew all along that all Joseph wanted was a Superman cake and presents from his friends. But then as I started planning the games, food, and decorations I had a lot of fun, so it ended up being a little more elaborate than what I would have guessed a month ago. I was able to keep to my rule that I wasn't allowed to do anything that I didn't really want to do, which is why the kids didn't get any party favors (more on that later).

Anyway, here's what I did!

Decorations

While Kevin and Joseph were at a Father/Son campout, I pulled up "Once I was a Beehive" and watched it while making a Superman cityscape. Hooray for construction paper and glue sticks!

They also came in handy for some birthday banners.

And of course, the streamers from my birthday were still up. Because we never take decorations down as a rule.

We also had some of these again since Joseph remembered them from last year.

Food

I hadn't wanted to feed people lunch/snacks, but as I thought about it I decided it would be more fun than hard.

Isn't the Internet great?

(Most of these came from Google, but I did come up with the laser vision carrots by myself. Unsurprisingly, they were not a success.)

Cake

As promised, I made a Superman cake. Actually 2 of them.

Turns out . . . I threw two parties. We are just so blessed to have so many fun kids all born the exact same year as Joseph, plus a few more the year before or after, that I ended up inviting almost 20 kids (with all but 4 showing up). And that requires two parties. (And even then, there were a few more who I wanted but I would start panicking about the thought of more kids and have to tell myself no. There's a point where the difficulty in inviting more children stops being logarithmic and starts being exponential, to put it in math terms.)

So yeah. 2 cakes. And then I worried that there wouldn't be enough cake, especially if some parents stuck around, so we had some backup cupcakes too.

Inside each cake was a layer of yellow cake (with a tiny bit of rainbow added from food coloring I threw in) and a layer of chocolate cake.

Costumes

Joseph has wanted a cape ever since he watched Incredibles (which seems backwards, but whatever), and we've usually just tied a blanket around. But for his birthday I decided to make a real one.

To make it, I cut the sleeves and front off of a medium T-shirt, added velcro to the collar, and voila!

Sorry . . . this is the best picture I've taken of it so far

To make a mask, I traced two pieces of felt, cut them out, and sewed a piece of elastic in between. Simple, right?

In theory, yes. But after a little bit of trouble with my sewing machine I ended up only making 4 masks. There was just no point, I decided.

But hey! Traced pieces of felt make great party favors for the moms!

Games

One tricky part about having two parties is planning for different weather throughout the day. The day before, there was a 50% chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon . . . which meant I had to be prepared for anything! By the day of the party, I had a pretty good list of both indoor and outdoor games.

For Party 1, we started off with an obstacle course outside. They had to put on a cape and mask, jump from chalk circle to chalk circle to avoid hot lava, run on some zigzags, run through some trees, and then go through a tunnel made out of a cardboard box.

To be honest, it was a little bit of chaos. My friend described it as herding bumblebees. It was hard for them to wait in line, and when I added more chalk and more tunnels to make it go two at a time they just got more confused. But I think they still had fun.

We then had another relay race where the kids had to carry water from a bowl to some water bottles. The team that filled the water bottle first got to run over to the chalk fire and extinguish it. Again, the concept of racing seemed a little beyond them, as did waiting in line, so the kids who were interested kept at it and the kids who weren't found sticks and acorns to play with. No worries. When one of the water bottles was full (enough), we all took turns pouring the water on the chalk and ultimately grabbed the big bowl of water to douse it completely. By then it was 80 something degrees, sunny, and humid, so we were all glad to go back inside. I didn't think they would concentrate any more, so we just opened presents and had cake. And then it was time to be done!

Between the two parties, I cleaned a little, checked the guest list again, panicked when I realized I hadn't done a very good job of making sure other adults would be there, and read some Beezus and Ramona to psych myself up for the impending doom. (It turned out there were 2 adults there most of the time, and one of them took care of Matthew so I didn't have to. Phew!)

For Party 2 . . . well, it started a bit early since all but one of the kids were neighbor boys who play in our basement pretty often. (I have probably made it sound like they always hang out here all the time, but I think there's at least one house they frequent a lot more often, and 1-2 more that they play at a lot too. So it's a good system.) When 3:00 hit, they came upstairs for the party.

This time I started with an indoor game, even though the thunderstorm never materialized. I turned on some superhero theme songs and had them dance. When the music stopped, they all had to freeze except the designated superhero, who crawled through their legs to free them. He would pass the cape and mask on to the next kid, and we'd do another round. Some of them decided instead of dancing to find the other 3 masks that I'd made but hadn't found a use for, so before I knew it they were basically all superheroes rescuing each other and not doing very much dancing. No worries.

Then we went out and did the obstacle course.  In contrast to the first party, there was no difficulty getting them to do the course. Around and around and around they all went in a line of 7 boys. Across the chalk rocks! Along the zigzag! Through the tunnel! And again! I lost track of how many times they did it. After a few minutes they petered out and started to scatter. Time for the next activity!

The fire-extinguishing water bottle game went pretty well again, though it also seemed to go pretty fast. When I went inside I was shocked at how early it still was. Joseph opened presents lickety split, and it had barely been a half hour since the party started. Time for more games!

They didn't seem that interested in Hot Potato Kryponite (using a piece of crumpled up tin foil), so that lasted for maybe 3 minutes. Welp, I thought, time for cake and snacks. Once all of that was done, the party had only lasted an hour. There was still no sign of rain, so I said, "The rest of the party is a water party!" So they all ran back to their houses and put on their swim shorts and played with a hose for the rest of the afternoon. Really, that's probably what they wanted all along.

When all was said and done, we were left with basically two halves of the two cakes, nearly two dozen cupcakes, a lot of rice kryptonite treats, and a whole lot more presents than I was expecting since I put "no presents" on the invitation (edit: it only made it onto one invitation! Oops!). So, wins all around, right?

And Joseph was happy. So that's what matters most.

We sure like him.