The Pirate Party

Here's the six-year-old himself yelling "aaaargh!" for the camera. How this child grew to be SIX is beyond me, but he is six indeed, so we celebrated it heartily on Saturday.Here's the gang at the breakfast table:
And just how did those hats come to be? I'm glad you asked! I bought a two-piece fish and fry at Long John Silver's with an extra side of fried clams and then helped myself to ten pirate hats.
I had three half-cans of black spray paint (your guess as to WHY I had three HALF cans is as good as mine) and so I painted over the cheesey LJS design.
I then used an exacto knife to cut skulls and party hats out of fun foam (Friday afternoon at the Blue Moon Coffee Company while drinking a Silken Moon listening to the novel The Girl with the Pearl Earring on my mp3 player--and yes I did bring a whole bag of craft supplies and camped out for an hour or two). I hot glued the pieces onto the hats and wrote the kids' names with paint pen.
I also cut black skulls and party hats out and hot glued them onto treat bags. These bags filled with candy, pencils, skull straws and odds and ends were the booty they found at the end of a treasure hunt.
And now for the masterpiece! Phoebe had a doughnut cake for her birthday and Moses wanted the same. I thought I'd make his more themeatic, though. My original thought was to build the sculpture entirely out of doughnuts, but Paul suggested using styrofoam balls as a form underneath the doughnuts -- a strok of genius, I must say. I had envisioned this turning out cool...but I had no idea it would be THIS cool. Here's the form:I secured the doughnuts to the foam with toothpicks. I used choco doughnuts cut in half for the nose hole and tooth gaps, and halved powdered ones where whole ones wouldn't fit. Here is the skull doughnut cake...voila!

The kids loved it. We had doughnuts, fruit salad and punch (OJ, sprite & orange sherbet--yum!). The did a three-legged race and an over-under relay with a ball, then an impromptu game of freeze tag because they were really wound up. Then we went in and opened presents.

The final activity was the treasure hunt. I divided them into three color coded teams and gave them each their first clue in a color coded envelope. The clues were all photos I had taken of things around the yard (these are kindergarteners so they mostly can't read). They ran outside to find whatever was in their photo (the jackolanterns, the hammock, the duckhouse, the fire pit, etc) where they found another envelope with another photo clue. There were eight locations in all--the teams all went different directions--and at the last location were there treat bags. It was very Camp Soaring Hawk. The logistics acutally worked out (I was a little worried I had over looked some detail or had things out of order), it was challenging but fun, and they were all excited to find their treats at the end.

The one problem: the party was a half hour too long. At an hour and a half I was all out of material and they were done with any sort of organized activities so I turned them loose in the basement. Note to self: no two hour parties.

Okay, that was not the one problem. The REAL problem was that ten minutes before the party my neighbor (whose two kids were coming to the party) called and yelled into the phone "come get luke! the ambulance is coming for annie!" I didn't ask questions, I just hung up, ran across the yard and brought the kid back to the house. Paul was a church preparing for a funeral so I called him and he went next door to wait with our neighbor for the paramedics because her husband was at work. It was awful. So as all Mo's friends are walking up our driveway for the party, their classmate was being loaded into the ambulance next door. It was terrible! She came home a few hours later and is doing fine. We brought over her pirate hat, treat bag and a breakfast plate. Annie was more upset over having missed the party than her medical condition, bless her heart.

We had a bazillion other things going on this weekend and I am thoroughly exhausted. I hope you all had a good weekend!