Due to some scheduling conflicts and the fact that Max kept forgetting to hand out the invitations at school, the party ended up being three weeks after his birthday.
We even tried to work a deal with the kid where we offered him a brand new bike instead of a party, but he had his heart set on the party, and we promised him a party.........
Up until the day before, we were trying to convince him to go with a different theme, seriously, the dollar store was full of really cool pirate stuff, but no dice, Max's obsession with the game "Plants vs zombies" won out.
The night before the party, I stayed up ridiculously late to make a zombie pinata (I didn't even attempt to buy one. I did a google search to see if I could find one as an example, but the only one I could find was too scary for me, let alone a group of seven year olds)
A bunch of newspaper, tape, crepe paper and a few hours later I came up with my version of a zombie pinata.
And before you ask, yes, I did mean to make it's eyes uneven.
During the time I had been taping this creation together, I was baking two dozen red velvet cupcakes. Max originally wanted brain cupcakes, but after finding some disgusting zombie looking teeth at the dollar store, I came up with the idea for the zombie cupcakes also. I will say that the teeth were a big hit with the kids.
Fortunately, they tasted much better than they looked.
Saturday morning, I was quite concerned, because Max had handed out 12 invitations, and I hadn't received a single RSVP.
We had made up 12 goodie bags full of dollar store plastic toys, and I really wanted to get rid of all of them.
We ended up having a total of 4 boys show up. Max said that the day before, all of the boys were asking where the party was going to be. I kind of wonder if some of them didn't come because we weren't going to a cool bouncy house or something. Max said a lot of the boys play soccer, so we're just going to assume that the other 8 boys were at soccer games.
We had several games planned for the party.
Game #1- Brielle had used sidewalk chalk to draw a large game board on our driveway. We called this game "Zombopoly"
Some of the squares said things like "You lost your head, go back two squares to find it" "Do a zombie dance and move ahead one square" and "You found a head, but it isn't your own, go back one square"
Aaron made a large dice (die? dice?) that the kids rolled to determine how many spaces to move.
I got this idea from a website with kids party games. It said that the kids LOVED to play this game. Actually, they were pretty lukewarm about it.
We did have some zombie glasses for them to wear while playing the game. I really wanted to get those glasses that have the eyeballs on springs, but we couldn't find them anywhere, so we went with some stupid plastic glasses with cardboard inserts that made them look like they had crazy eyes. I guess I shouldn't complain, they were 6 for a dollar at the dollar store.
We had also planned to play some other games, we had a relay race planned, a version of musical chairs, using the music from Plants vs Zombies, and a game called "Wake the zombie" One child lays on the ground, very still, and the others take turns saying things to try and make them laugh. Once the "Zombie" laughs then their turn is over, and the kid that makes them laugh gets to be the zombie.
Unfortunately, the boys were more interested in jumping on the trampoline than they were in playing the games.
The boys found our stash of pool noodles. These had been cut in half to make "snords" they created a new game on the trampoline which was basically jumping while whacking each other with the snords.
We managed to get them off of the trampoline long enough to eat some pizza. One kid didn't like pepperoni, so I peeled it off for him, then he said the pizza looked weird and he wouldn't eat it. Another kid already ate lunch and wasn't hungry.
We had a lot of pizza left over.
We had pizza for dinner Saturday night and breakfast on Sunday.
We got some special relighting candles for Max. He hadn't ever seen these before, and he thought they were pretty funny.
I love his giggles :)
Max opened his presents and got several Lego sets. This is great, because he loves builing things!
Next, we broke the pinata. Unfortuantely, the plastic broom handle broke before the pinata, so they used the shorter pieces of the broom handle until they broke, then they just started stabbing it with the small sharp pieces of the broom handle.
Let me just point out now that Smarties are not the best candy to put in a pinata. When beaten and stabbed, the packages break and you end up with a lawn full of Smartie dust and plastic wrappers.
We finally just dumped all of the candy out and the boys piled on top of each other to get at it. All except for Max, he ended up with one tootsie roll. Poor Max.
One kid, Connor ended up stuffing his goodie bag so full of pinata candy that it broke. All of the boys put their candy on the table and went back to jumping on the trampoline.
Within a few minutes, there was a new hole in the net of the trampoline, it is a hole large enough to drive a car through. Aaron said that Connor was the one that did it.
While Connor wasn't looking, I had Aaron go and take about half of the pinata candy out of his bag and put it in a bag for Max.
Without the net on the trampoline, we didn't feel it was safe for them to be on it, so we needed a new activity. Aaron brought out the water balloons that he had spent the morning filling. Aaron was very protective of the water balloons, because he discovered just how much work it was to fill them. He split the kids up in teams, gave them each one water balloon and a snord then told them to fight each other. It didn't take long for all of their balloons to be broken and so then they started beating Aaron with the snords.
After a few minutes of this, he just gave up and let them go crazy at each other with the bucket of water balloons.
Soon after, the parents started showing up to get their kids. I gave each one a goodie bag full of plastic junk and sent them home:)
Then I sat on my porch swing, looked at all of the mess in the back yard, put on a pair of Zombie glasses, closed my eyes and took a nap.
I now have less than a year to convince Max that a new bike would be way better than a party.
