The World Of Woodbury: Ethan's Party

In my family growing up, we got to have a "friends" party every other year and just a "family" party on the opposites. I don't recall minding and I think this kept my poor mother sane with so many kids. Taylor on the other hand comes from a family where they had big, over the top parties every single year. It stems in part from his grandmother who missed out on years of parties with her family during WWII and therefore felt celebrating birthdays was very important so she threw big parties each year for her 3 daughters. And that passed on down to Taylor's mom throwing big parties for him.

This year with us being busy with travel and pregnancy and remodeling and so many other things, and with Ethan's birthday being exactly 3 weeks before my due date, I told Ethan that maybe we should just do a "take your friends to the movie or museum or someplace" party with just a few people. Taylor was none to pleased with my suggestion and insisted that if it was too much to do a party at our house 37 weeks pregnant then we should just do it somewhere else. Sold!

Last year Ethan got invited to a party at the local Gymnastics Training Center and had a blast. It's close and reasonably priced and easy to we just went with it. All I had to do was make some invitations, make some cupcakes, and show up. Easy-peasy!

Unfortunately it turned out to be a really busy Saturday for our family since Taylor was in charge of a booth at the state scout-a-rama and then that night he'd previously agreed to bring out family to a REAL soccer game with clients and Ethan had a soccer game that day of course. So back to back events, and exhausting, but a fun day.

The center had 2 girls that ran the whole thing and spotted the kids and made sure they all followed the safety rules.

Miles spent almost the whole time jumping up and down on their many trampolines.

The foam pits were a hit too. Taylor jumped in to see how deep they were and couldn't even find the bottom. He did however donate a sock which slipped off and he couldn't find in the pit.

The kids literally ran and jumped and climbed and played and chased each other for 2 hours.

We took a break halfway through for cupcakes and grapes and gatorade. Since we didn't have a theme for his party, I just typed in cupcakes to pinterest and let Ethan browse the thousands of amazing creations. It took him less than 30 seconds to settle on these cute angry birds. There were several different sites and he insisted I HAD to make the black birds. SOOOO easy. Just make the cupcakes, frost with appropriate colors, add marshmallows halved for their bellies, tiny marshmallows and tiny chocolate chips for their eyes, orange slices in thirds for their beaks and licorice for the eyebrows. I did add sanding sugar to the red and black ones since I can never get truly black or red frosting and Ethan wouldn't have wanted pink and purple ones. And of course the green pigs had to be made too.
I learned a lot making them. I've played the game before but didn't realize that each color bird has a different thing it does and that in fact I should have made several other colors. The kids at the party kept asking where this one or that one was since they wanted to eat their favorite. Who knew?

Trying to settle down 17 kids after letting them run wild was a little difficult.

It was quiet for all of 4 minutes while they were shoveling their snacks.

Ethan of course picked a red bird.

And grams came to help. Thank you! We ended up letting Ethan invite a lot of kids as always. His life is scattered over 3 different groups- church, soccer, and school and almost none of those kids overlap. So it means lots of friends for him, but makes it hard to not invite a lot.

As soon as the food was consumed the chaos began again. Everyone wanted Ethan to open their present first and then as soon as it was opened they ran off again to go play.