The Boys' Circus Birthday Party

Last Saturday was the boys' circus-themed birthday party. I had hoped to have the whole thing in the backyard--was planning to decorate the backyard like a carnival midway, have all the games on the driveway, and was counting on the kids' playing on the swingset to burn off energy... The best laid plans...*sigh* Saturday ended up being the exclamation point on a week of torrential downpours. So the party moved inside...

I moved all the furniture out of the boys' playroom and put all the games in there. We had a ring toss. I re-purposed 1/2 of a cornhole game and made a bean bag toss feed-the-lion game. We had a toss-the-ball-in-the-popcorn box game (our take on the ping-pong-ball-in-the-fish-bowl). We had pin the nose on the clown. Plus, a guess-how-many-m&ms-are-in-a-jar game (607 and I counted every single one of them).

The boys had a great time helping me set up. They especially loved all the helium balloons.

I was lucky enough to have A LOT of help for this party. My in-laws and brother and sister-in-law came to help us, running the games and "concessions" so that Tom and I could run around like chickens with our heads cut off keep everything running smoothly. I seriously could not have pulled it off without the four extra sets of hands. It was complete and total chaos, but at least with them around, it was controlled chaos. :-)

I decorated the dining room table, and had some crafts set up for the kids to make when they arrived. They had a choice between circus animal visors or clown hats (paper party hats) that they could decorate with glitter glue, pompoms, feathers, and jewels.

 I ordered plain cupcakes from Price Chopper and put my own clown picks in them. The cake stand also came with balloon picks, so the cupcakes looked very festive.

We also served lemonade, popcorn, soft pretzels, and snow cones. When I found out that it would cost $50 a day to rent a snow cone machine, I decided I'd be better off just buying a small snow cone machine to have at home. I found one on amazon.com that came with all the syrups, cups, and spoons--for $50. To me that seemed like a much better deal!

Mommy had a lot of fun planning for this party. Can you tell? LOL