Well, not quite yet.. but, with Baby #5 due any day, we figured this might be our best chance to throw him a proper birthday party this year. He's been asking for weeks to get a race car, a jet and a helicopter for his birthday presents. He is definitely a boy and loves all things that go. So Rebecca came up with the wonderful idea of doing a plane themed party for him.
We started out the day with a special airplane breakfast.
He thought that was just fantastic, but he had no idea what was waiting for him outside.
The other kids certainly weren't complaining either.
Our friend, Kim, had done a similar party for her son a couple of years ago, so Rebecca borrowed the idea of making planes that the kids could wear out of banana boxes from Costco. I painted them in bright colors, cut a hole for their head and added wings & propellers.
We decorated the yard with inflatable planes, pennants, pinwheels and cloud balloons. Once he got outside and saw the decorations, he was so excited and kept pointing out what he wanted to play with first.
Rebecca made a beautiful, 3-layer cake with clouds & sky icing and a plane & clouds cake topper. It has his number 3 that he is so proud of!
Ezra asked for a chocolate chip cake so she happily obliged with 2 layers of yellow and one of dark chocolate, all with chips and made from scratch!
Once the guests arrived, we got the action going by having the kids use the parachute to toss once of the inflatable planes and a "cloud" we had made from styrofoam balls and hot glue.
After that were the airplane races. We found some felt hats with goggles sewn on them and got the kids into their planes. They had to race out and around the kids' stump table and back. Unfortunately, Elijah lost a wing and went quite out of control.
Everybody enjoyed racing their planes around the yard.
Then we slowed things down a little with some coloring. We took some ordinary crayons, melted them down in the microwave and poured them into an airplane mold.
Then we had the kids put together these small foam gliders we found online.
The gliders came in a pack of 72 for about a dollar, but flew surprisingly well.
I'm sure I'll be "finding" them with the mower next week. :)
Ah, the good part. Rebecca cut out sandwiches with an airplane cutter and we made little cups of "sky": Berry Blue Jello sky with whipped cream clouds. Of course, there's that wonderful cake again.
After eating, Grandpa "flew" Ezra in to blow out his candles.
He blew them out, but they lit back up!
Oh no! trick candles!
Ezra wasted no time getting down to business.
Jet? Check! (Thank you Vaughns!)
Race cars? Check! (Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!)
He was so excited about his gifts, he just had to play with them right the
Emma found herself a balloon to squeeze. She just adored the clouds!
Later, after everyone left and the kiddos took a nap, we let Ezra open his gift from us.
Our friends, the Grims, have a toy similar to this one and, whenever we go over there,
he is inseparable from it.
This one is a race track that has side-by-side cars and a starting gate to have races down the levels. The kids pretty much played with this from after dinner until bedtime.
In the end, it was a wonderful day. The rain held off and the kids had a fun time. I think this will be one day Ezra will be talking about for the next year!
