The event:  Sam’s 7th birth­day party

The theme:  Army Party!

The ideas:  Some were acquired by Inter­net searches, some just sounded like fun dur­ing the party planning.

Sam’s birth­day is at the begin­ning of April, so weather in Wis­con­sin can be 80 degrees or 10 degrees.  You just never know.  This year, it was about 40 and overcast/partly sunny.  It was raining/snowing all morn­ing, so we didn’t know what to expect for the after­noon party.  Either way, the party was going down, outside!

When the kids arrived, they checked in at the Army tent to get marked on the ros­ter and receive their Army hel­met and sup­plies, then off to face paint­ing to get camo’d up.  They were let to run around a bit and greet each other for a while, then, once the major­ity of the kids arrived, we started the activities.

The pic­tures:

Army crawl under a net…

   

 

Crawl through a ‘mud tun­nel’, which was really just a princess tun­nel cov­ered with brown paper and held down with a sand bag.

 

Walk across a bal­ance beam (not pictured).

Med­ical prac­tice.  One brave par­ent vol­un­teered to be the patient and all the kids ban­daged her up.

 

 

Egg carrying/toss.  The kids were sup­posed to throw the eggs at a tree at the end of the cones, which they did for a few min­utes.  Then, one par­ent thought it’d be funny to have one of the kids throw the egg at him and he’d dodge it.  That was fine, when it was 1 lit­tle girl throw­ing the egg, but once more kids saw what was going down, it was ‘game on’.  See photo of par­ent flee­ing while in hot pur­suit by a group of ban­dit kids armed with eggs.

   

 

After the “egging” inci­dent, it was time for the scav­enger hunt.  We didn’t cap­ture any pic­tures of the scav­enger hunt, though, in hind site, totally should have.  We marched up the lane to the father-in-law’s house where we had placed clues through out his 50 acre woods.  Each clue gave a hint to find the next clue, lead­ing to a mil­i­tary prize box filled with prizes.  The final box had a clue to head back to the main house to dig up the final prize, buried in the sandbox.

Once we got back from the hike through the woods, it was time for cake, ice cream and snacks and to warm up a little.

   

 

After cake and snacks, it was time to knock the Army Tank pinata around a bit.  The tank was really cool, how­ever, it had a week point.  After 2 hits, the top part of the tank popped off and I had to re-attach the rope to the body of the tank.  Shortly after that, one of the girls gave it a good crack and all the candy came falling down.

 

Birth­day boy wear­ing the top of the tank as a hat.

 

After the pinata, it was squirt gun tar­get prac­tice.

 

Which then turned into squirt gun war­fare…  Water bal­loons were also brought out for tar­get prac­tice and that also turned into water bal­loon bomb­ing, instead of tar­get practice.

 

After the water fun, it was just about time for the 2 hour party to come to an end, but there was one last thing to do…  The ticket blaster!

Last year, we built a ticket blaster (sort of like the ticket blaster from Chuck E. Cheese, but not as fancy) and it’s been in stor­age ever since.  We brought it out again and it was a hit, again.  It has a door and lights and air shoot­ing around it like crazy.  It works best in low light, as the col­or­ful rope light­ing adds to the effect, but its just fine mid-day too.

 

 

After the kids were done with the ticket blaster, the party was offi­cially over, but as kids were wait­ing for their par­ents to show up, every­one grav­i­tated back to the back yard for more fun.  Some of the extra fun included TP’ing the club house and ban­dag­ing up kids.

 

Some ran­dom shots from inside:

Lizzy (our youngest, sis­ter to bday boy) and her pal hav­ing fun with crazy glasses.

 

 

Over­all, it was a suc­cess of a party.  Every­body had fun, we had great helpers who stayed to help clean up and enjoy drinks and pizza after­wards.  We’re already think­ing of next year.  We found a com­pany that brings a laser tag setup to your house.  Hmm, the possibilities!