18th birthday

We have another adult in the house!  About a week before Nathan's birthday, I decided that we had to do a party.  I asked Nathan what he wanted to do, but he didn't know, so I decided to plan it.  It was like a surprise party, except he knew when it was and who was coming.  He just had no idea that we were going to do.  I decided to go back through his childhood and do activities that related to things he liked or past parties.  I planned to do one activity for each year of his life.  It turned out to be a ton of work, but pretty fun.  We had dinner first and then watched a video slideshow of highlights of Nathan.  Then we did most of the years (we didn't quite do all of them): 

2004 - Diaper changing relay with bears that had Nathan's baby face on it.

2005 - Australia video and hopping with a balloon relay

2006 - talking - ice breaker questions

2007- trains - made paper trains

2008 - Apples - rolling race

2009 - Superheroes - Captain America shield throw

2010 - Good memory - memory game with Nathan pictures

2011 - Singing - watched past videos of him singing and then everyone got to sing an action primary song with a partner

2012 - Sports - Slideshow sports video and paper football game

2013 - Basketball - Hoop shoot game we have in the garage

2014 - Legos - Building a car competition

2015 - Soccer - balloon relay

2016 and 2018 - backpacking / Survivor - Scavenger Hunt and Decoded message

2017 - England - saying British phrases with an accent

2019 - Driving - Pushing the Lego cars with a broomstick

2020 - Sculpture - Playdoh

2021 - Missionary Work - Church Jeopardy

We didn't end up doing the last 2 years and accidentally skipped the memory game.  They were just ready to hang out for a while after doing 14 of the activities.  The activity that took me the most time to prepare was the scavenger hunt.  I made 4 different hunts (for 4 teams) throughout our house.  They found the clues (backpacking items) and then each of the clues had a word to be decoded and unscrambled.  Then the words had to be unscrambled to make a phrase - sort of a Survivor style challenge (Survivor was his 13th birthday party).  The phrase was "Celebrate the last night of childhood with a journey through the ages."  

The party seemed to be a success - the only downer was that only 5 of the 12 guests were able to make it to the party.  Two of his friends couldn't come at the last minute, because they had just found out their Mom had Covid.  Otherwise, everyone seemed to have a good time!