Jared celebrated his golden birthday this year. I did my best to do a golden cake. It reminded me of Belle's dress from Beauty and the Beast... We didn't do much on his actual birthday since he was working and Alex didn't get back from his trip until about 8:30pm. Our friends dropped by and ended up joining us for cake. I made his birthday breakfast the next morning.
The big celebration was a couple weeks after his birthday. I threw one last themed party for him that encompassed his past birthdays, similar to what I did for Nathan's 18th party. I basically re-created several elements of his past parties, which was a lot of work. I love the then & now pictures.
I re-created his 1st birthday giant cupcake and crown. We had Doritos and juice boxes which represented his 2nd birthday (airplane party). I made a paper mâché cowboy hat and did the farm themed cupcakes (which I forgot to take a picture of the recent ones) for his 3rd birthday. I decorated one of the tables with the farm theme. His 4th birthday was dinosaur themed, with cardboard dino feet and paper dino hats. I had them make their own dino hats, which most of them wore the entire party. After creating the hats, we did an egg & spoon race while wearing the dino feet. (I bought 8 boxes of pineapple from Costco for the dino feet.) It was hilarious watching them try to walk in those things.
His 5th birthday was Batman theme, so I made 2 cardboard Batmobiles again. However, for his 5th birthday, we used those to sled down a pine-needle hill. This time I wanted to put wheels on them so we could ride around in them. I did the cardboard cars and then Alex attached the wheels on by using a furniture cart with a couple extra pieces of wood attached. They turned out better and faster than I expected, and I'm surprised that no one got hurt. We probably should have had helmets while riding in those things. And the first attempt nearly sent them crashing into the wall... they were lots of fun!
He didn't have friend parties every year so not all years are represented. The next year represented was his 7th birthday, which was Star Wars theme. I re-made the Darth Vader pinata filled with "darkside" purple Skittles. The thing about the pinata is it only took Jared a couple of tries to completely whack off the head and send it flying. I remember as little kids they each got 1-2 swings before breaking it open... not as exciting for big kids to pick up the candy either! We also did "shoot-the-Storm Trooper" with nerf guns. One of the dinner tables was also Star Wars theme.
His 9th birthday was ninja themed. I used that to create a dinner theme for our party. The dinner was a new thing for this party. I wanted to do something besides pizza or hamburgers, so I went with Asian themed (maybe stretching it a bit). We had white rice, vegetable fried rice, spring rolls, Yakisoba noodles, Mongolian beef, and orange chicken. I made the Mongolian beef and white rice and prepared the frozen oven spring rolls and Yakisoba noodles (microwavable). I decided to buy the fried rice and orange chicken from Panda Express. (I still had to work that Friday so I only had a couple hours before the party to prepare things.) I re-made the red and black paper lanterns and black ninja stars to decorate the food table. I ended up preparing way too much food. We only had 7 of 16 invited guests show, but I wasn't sure how many to plan for (since they either didn't respond or replied "yes" but then didn't show up). With our family and a couple extra adult friends, we still fed 15 people. I re-created the Asian gift favor boxes with rice krispie treat "fried rice" and Chex muddy buddies "meat". However, on the boxes this time, I printed out a funny picture of Jared from each year along with his name and age in Japanese on the other side of the box. Those looked pretty cute as table decor. I forgot to take pictures of the tables.
His 11th birthday was Spartan theme. We didn't do any of the challenges, but I re-made the spartan cupcakes (which I also forgot to take a recent picture of) and decorated one of the dinner tables with that theme.
We were in England for his 12th birthday. I made a video of his England year. I also made 2 other videos to watch for this party. One was pictures from each of the years (18 years video). The other one was action videos. It was hilarious to hear him talking and dancing and being a kid. The videos actually took a combined 30 minutes or so to watch, so we had popcorn while watching. (I might post links to the 3 videos later - they would have to be uploaded to YouTube first since the files are too large to directly post here.)
His 14th birthday was Covid year, so no party. The next friend party was his 16th birthday, which was sweet sixteen theme. I made Twix cheesecake bars, cookies, and brownies - we had plenty of dessert!
The other activity we did towards the end was drawings of Jared. I found a cute self-portrait of Jared from 4 years old, so I thought it would be fun to get a new self-portrait. They didn't spend much time on them, but it was fun to see the drawings of Jared. He actually is pretty good at drawing, having taken a couple freehand drawing classes at school. The other thing for this party that I did was several picture display boards and some other things about Jared. He did a really good drawing of his track shoes (which I'll show in another post). He also made some pretty cool things in woodworking class. I tried to highlight his sports, Legos, and camping / backpacking trips in the photos. He also has a pretty good collection of Calvin and Hobbes books. I also had to find his favorite stuffed giraffe "Raffe" and display it. Raffe has been well loved though and lost a lot of fluff so that it's pretty droopy.
The party turned out great and lots of fun! It was very exhausting though. The last picture shows just some of the stuff I carted along to the party. The kitchen was a disaster, and we spent a while cleaning up at the church after the party. (And we stayed an extra couple hours cleaning the rest of the church building since Alex had signed our family up to do the building cleaning that week.) We didn't get home until about 11:45pm that night. It was worth it though to see the smiles on Jared's face. It's crazy to think this is the last friend party I'll do for Jared though, so I wanted to go out big!
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