Seven!

Samuel turned 7 last week. He is super into transformers these days, so he asked for a transformers birthday party.  His birthday parties the past few years have been very involved, so this year I decided to scale things back a little. We still did fun things, but nothing like making Buzz Lightyear costumes for every child in attendance (2010) or creating a cardboard version of Lightning McQueen that kids could fit in (2011) .

Here is the invitation:



I told him that since he was turning 7 he could have 7 kids (including him) so he picked 6 friends to invite.

The kids had a lot of fun painting robot banks:

















In order to find their cupcakes, I set up a simple treasure hunt. In the picture below our neighbor from down the street (who we hired to help us at the party) is reading the clues to the kids:




Here are the cupcakes (made by a friend) which were hidden in the dryer:

We had a pull-string pinata. Each child took a turn pulling a string. One of the strings opened the pinata. Becca actually pulled that string.



One neat thing the kids played with at the party were these water beads. You can get them all kinds of places - Michael's, Wal-Mart, amazon. They start off really tiny, like the size of round sprinkles. You place them in water and they grow (over 4-6 hours) to the size of marbles. They are squishy like gummy bears and they are a really neat sensory experience to run your hands through. I made ours extra cool by hydrating them in glow water (break open a highlighter and run water through the sponge until you get all of the color out.) Then if you use a black light, the water beads will glow in the dark.

 

And what would a birthday party be without presents? Samuel got all sorts of new transformers from his friends, along with art supplies, a nerf dart gun, and even some transformer pajamas. All in all, it was a great party. Happy Birthday, Samuel!