Party Time!

I feel like I have been in party planning mode for months! Having a birthday close to Halloween makes it pretty easy to plan a party, if you're up for a Halloween themed one! Luckily Levi was game for that, so the planning began there. He had a huge list of friends he wanted to invite, so we invited them all, hoping not everyone would be able to come lol. We ended up with 6 little boys which turned out to be the perfect amount. One thing I learned is that a party with a bunch of boys compared to a party with a bunch of girls will go very differently! For Tori's party last month We had 2 activities planned, and were rushing to fit everything in. With Levi's party, I had 5 activities planned, and we were finished in a little over an hour, including cake and presents! I totally thought I had over planned and then ended up having to think of something to keep the rowdy boys occupied at the end, They just flew through everything! When they first arrived they played for a few minutes outside, and then came in to decorate their treat bags.

After that we headed outside to paint pumpkins! I found a cute idea on pinterest (my newest obsession) for a pumpkin painting party, so used some ideas from that. I was able to find a great deal on pumpkins at Walmart. 2.99 a piece, no matter what size. You sure can't beat that!Everyone loved painting their pumpkins. Luckily we made them all wear paint shirts, because they got paint everywhere!

As they finished with their pumpkins they gravitated towards the ever popular tree swing that Brandon made when we first moved in.

At this point I was still worried about having enough time for everything so I called them all in for our next activity, Musical Ghosts, similar to musical chairs.

This game was a last minute game. Levi had been saying for weeks that he wanted to do the donut on a string game, where you hang donuts from strings and then everyone races to see who can eat theirs first. It sounded easy enough. So I bought the donuts, string, a plastic table cloth to put on the ground to catch the mess, and then got to work setting it all up. Brandon doubted my plan from the beginning, but I was determined that it would be fine. I first hung all of the string on the ceiling with thumb tacks. Then I attached the first donut. Within a few seconds of attaching it, the whole string fell, sending the donut crashing to the ground, covering the carpet with chocolate frosting (I hadn't put the tablecloth down yet). I tried tying a knot at the end of the string in hopes that would help it to stay attached to the ceiling better, but the same thing happened again! I quickly scrapped that idea and then we had a bunch of string just randomly hanging from the ceiling. Alexis came up with the idea to hang ghosts from them and play musical ghosts. She made a bunch of cute little ghosts out of Kleenex, and attached them to the end of each string. Alexis to the rescue! The game turned out to be a hit! =)

Next on the agenda was pumpkin bowling, another idea I found on pinterest. I cut out faces and taped them on some rolls of toilet paper to make them look like ghosts, and found a small pumpkin to use as the ball. They each got three tries to knock all the "pins" down. It was a fun little game to play.

Tori was such a great help with this game. She set up all the toilet paper rolls after each boys turn.

Next we headed to the backyard for some pinata fun. I found a ghost, zombie looking pinata at Walmart, and Levi had a blast filling it full of candy. When Brandon picked it up to take outside to hang up, the hanger on the top snapped right off! I am so grateful to have such a handy husnbad. He finagled a new way to hang it up in no time. It took two rounds of turns before they finally broke it open.

Then it was present time! Here's the cute bunch of boys.

After presents we headed to the kitchen for donuts and ice cream. I saw another cute idea online (what would I do without the internet?!) where you scoop the ice cream into cup cake cups and put them in the freezer, so when it's time to eat you can just take them out of the freezer and serve. I worked out really good! After seeing how messy they got with the donuts I was so glad we didn't end up doing the donut on a string game. It would have been so much messier!

So, one would think that all of those activities would take up all the time right? Well not in this case. It took 1 hour and 25 min from start to end, which left me with 35
minutes with a bunch of sugared up little boys and nothing planned. So we broke out the Halloween party music and played freeze dance for a while. The boys were all so hilarious as they danced.

Notice the hand stand in the background?? lol

After they got tired of dancing we sent them to the backyard to run around. It turned out to be a great very fast paced party. Levi loved it and I hope his friends did too!

After planning three birthday parties, and a baptism within 4 months of eachother I am partied out! I had so much fun planning everything, but it will be glad to have a break for a while (just in time for the holidays, right? haha)