A Year Older and Wiser (Mom too!)

This year, I was going to be prepared. I was. I knew Kev's birthday is (relatively speaking) right after Christmas....March sounds far away...but trust me, after all the Sinterklaas / Christmas bills roll in sometime after the new year, I'm already having to think about party themes, invites, etc.........

These past months have been all about Kev's newest passion - football. Since September, he trains every Wednesday and has games every Saturday (usually 8.30 AM!) and in between he wants to play in pick up games in the field near the house, play after school at at the day care, play during recess.......you get the idea.

So, I thought - why not do a football theme party? I did some research and found a football shaped piñata (since that went over so well last year), came up with the idea for how to make football cupcakes for the class party, purchased a ''how to" plan for a football themed scavenger/activity hunt, and decided the boys coming would be old enough to handle using the chocolate fountain that has been collecting dust since we last used it at Thanksgiving  -  2010   .... I came across an idea for make your own pizza's for the lunch......We had all the elements in place around mid-Feb....handmade invites were ready to go out.

I braced myself for another birthday party. At home.

It needs to be said - what was I thinking?! 8 boys from ages 6-8..... You cannot calculate how much energy they generate (and feed off of each other) - but it's exponential. A mathematical impossibility. I was so glad I had my activities all lined up, an agenda to stick to - the plan was to keep things moving along, the fights to a minimum, and the house on it's foundation by the end of the afternoon. I can do this!

Well, maybe I could.......

Make your own pizza's went over well, but as the pizzas were going into the oven, the worst thing possible for a party centered around an outdoor football themed scavenger hunt happened...it started raining, Buckets. In true cats and dogs, let's build an ark kind of way - and it proceeded to continue to do so for the next 3 hours - and all my party planning went out the window.

We stuck to the chocolate fountain. While the (once white) dining room chairs are a little worse for the wear now, it was a hit. We had grapes, strawberries, raspberries, bananas, lady fingers and ribbed potato chips for dipping!

Next year - Not that I want to think about next year, but I think maybe 24 hours had passed before Kevin was talking about ''next year'' - I'm having the party somewhere else. Anywhere else. I'm still vacuuming up confetti from the piñata that we ended up hanging from the ceiling fan.........