All right, Carrie. You can stop the harassing emails. Your fellow blogger is coming out of hiding, finally. It's been a crazy 3 weeks. Let's review:
The entire week before S's b-day I was doing party preparations. Trips to Target, Costco, the trophy store... busy, busy. The following week was spring break, C had a mole removed which required 2 trips to the dr., S went to the dr. once, and I was planning the baptism. We took a stressful trip to Piermont, NY to pick up a bike that didn't fit in our car, and the family began arriving. On Friday they ripped up my lawn, and dirt spewed all over the house I (and by I, I mean my cleaning lady Annie) had just cleaned for all our visitors, so I had to clean it AGAIN. The entire weekend was crazy busy with all the visitors and baptism prep. Everyone was gone by last Tuesday, but Nana stayed on, so I had a giant list of things I wanted to get done while she was here, so I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off.
That was a long explanation but you can now all fully understand why the Pokemon party post was a bit delayed. Without further ado...
Well, it’s only taken me 8 years to learn to throw a successful kids’ party. Of course, it didn’t hurt that most of the guests were 8 years old. Both S and I were kind of stressed beforehand, because of last year’s Krypto party, where we had a group of kids that didn’t mix well and no one wanted to do the stuff I had planned. S even asked me a couple days before: “Mom, what if no one wants to do the activities?” I replied, “Don’t worry... they will” while thinking,
If they don’t participate, I’ll just call their moms and tell them to come and pick them up. Or maybe I’ll tie them to the treehouse.We started out with a discussion, where I told the kids that today we were going to train to become Pokemon masters. Then I took them into the kitchen, where the table was set up with 30 different colors of Sculpey clay. Their instructions were to create their own Pokemon... a new kind that had not been discovered yet. They LOVED it. S is a huge fan of Sculpey, and we’ve made all kinds of stuff out of it, including a 12 inch tall replica of Amelia Earhardt.
After that, we went back into the living room for a Pokemon quiz. I divided the kids into two teams, and asked them a series of trivia questions (created by yours truly) that started out easy and got progressively harder. The harder the questions got, the closer the contestants got to me. By the 5th question both teams were screaming and jumping up and down, about 2 inches from my face. They were into it! I got a little claustrophobic though.
Then we headed outside to hunt for Pokemon that were lost (Pokemon cards). Each kid was allowed to find 4 cards, and they were acting like I had hidden $20 bills out there in the yard. Travis told me one guest said to S: “This is the BEST PARTY EVER!!” to which S replied: “I KNOW!” I try not to brag.
After everyone had found their cards, we came back in for Pokemon bingo. I had made up 15 different cards, and we made it so each child got Bingo twice. They didn’t seem to care if they got it first, or 10th. As long as they all got Bingo and the candy prize, they were stoked. Then we had the awards ceremony.
I had been planning this part of the party for months. S is obsessed with trophies, medals, and ribbons. She got her first medal from soccer a couple of months ago, and wears it to church every couple of weeks. She won’t even let baby Oz play with it, for fear he’ll break it. She’s been known to spend hours in aunt Yah Yah’s room, drooling over all the running trophies. Since there’s no telling when she’ll get one of her own, I decided to give her the first. I found a trophy store in Yonkers, and for a mere $3.75 each, got each kid an engraved bowling trophy (it was the closest thing to a Pokeball that I could find). I called S up first, and made a speech about how great they all did, and how they all won the award, and then reached in the box and presented her with a jar of baby food. She loved it... it was like April Fools’ day part 2. Then I pulled out the trophy and the kids were so excited. A bunch of them were like, “This is my first trophy ever!” I loved it.
Then we just had pizza and Pokeball cupcakes. It was a great time. The best part about it was that Oz, who is not a fan of huge groups of screaming kids, spent the entire party up in his crib watching Dora. Ada spent half of the time up there with him, since she loves him more than any party. We checked on him every few minutes (and listened on the baby monitor) and he was happy as a clam... and Trav and I didn’t have to watch him and were able to enjoy the party. I think I had almost as much fun as the kids did. It was such a fun group; really nice boys and girls who were very well-behaved (aside from a small brick throwing off the tree house incident, but we banned them from the tree house after that).
