Birthday Bug Hunt

Birthdays are a big deal around here (duh).  Certain people of the under-4-feet set spend the entire year dreaming about their birthdays: the gifts, the friends, the venue, and the cake.  Invites to these exclusive affairs are hard to come by, and, depending on your status with the birthday person, you may or may not score one for the big day. 

I've personally been uninvited to a certain individual's party

 at least 1,687 times just this year.  

This summer, Mike and I talked about scaling back on birthdays and moving toward doing the friends birthday party thing every other year, like a wise friend of ours does. 

 It makes sense to birthday-shunning grownups, but how do you explain that to the younger set?  Speaking from personal experience, it doesn't go over well.  

We knew we couldn't go cold turkey, so we limited our guest list to neighbors.  In all, there were 4 children besides my own, and Sarah was happy as a clam.

Since March, Sarah has been talking about camping out in the backyard, and I promised her we could do it on her birthday.  Add to that the anticipation of lovely weather and a plethora of lightning bugs, and we decided to do a bug hunt with some neighbors as well.

Mind you, we decided to roll all this birthday and bug hunt business together 5 days before the day of the fete.  So, how do you throw a last-minute party to satisfy a newly-minted 5-year-old? 

Let the kids stay up late.

Seriously.

We had four neighbor kids, their parents, ourselves, and a handful of balloons, and the birthday girl couldn't have been happier. 

I think that's one of Sarah's gifts: she makes the most of any party.  As long as you have Cheetos, cake, balloons, and junk  favors to send home with her friends, it's all good. 


Here's a rundown on the details:

Decor

You're lookin' at it.

Food

Cheetos, juice boxes, watermelon, and s'mores.

The birthday "cake" was dirt cake, in individual cups for each guest.

I wanted Sarah to pick out a cute little flower pot to serve her dirt cake in, but, in a fit of contrariness, she chose a flower pot that looked like a tea cup and saucer.     

Gummy worms and lollipop flowers just seemed a natural fit for a bug hunt birthday.

These dirt cakes are so rich, nobody could eat very much of them, and nobody ate the worms.  But, since it was International Mud Day on Saturday, they fit perfectly.

Games and Activities

The real hit of the evening was the s'mores-making over a real fire pit that 
our sweet neighbors kindly hosted especially for the birthday girl.

I don't have any pictures of the marshmallow roasting because
I take the "keeping kids alive" part of my job pretty seriously.  

We had nets on hand for each guest, as well as bug jars for holding the little fellas.

You can't really see it due to my mad photography skills and positioning clear jars on a marble table, but I painted little lightning bugs on there with glow paint so 

we could leave the real bugs out in the wild while still enjoying the glow of their little lights.

Once it got all purply and dusky outside, we spotted the first victim firefly, and it was ON!

Sharing bugs

It is REALLY hard to take decent pictures and hold 2 jars and a net at the same time. 

After (temporarily) depopulating the neighborhood of sweet lil' lightning bugs, 

we moved on to glow necklaces and bracelets. 

I like to think of these as hunting trophies.  

Kind of like a 21st-century version of the necklace made of shrunken heads or boar's teeth.

We also made little lightning bugs out of battery-operated tea lights, plastic Easter eggs, and pipe cleaners.  These were so easy and they mollified our blood-thirsty hunters for an hour until their innocent prey emerged for the hunt.

Smiling buggy face

Glowing buggy hind-end

 We topped off the night with some local camping.  

In our den.  

The original plan was to sleep outside, but Sarah graciously offered to compromise 

and "camp in" instead. 

 So much fun and so little work.  

I'm pretty sure we just started an annual summer tradition.

 

Fiesta: Spanish for "Smack Your Neighbors With a Pool Noodle"

What do you do when your 4 y/o says to you, all Scarface-style, "I want to have a fiesta,"?

Well, when people around here start speaking espanol, we sit up and take notice.  I really think one of Sarah's superpowers is knowing what you need, when you need it, because getting together with the neighbors was just the thing. 

In case you didn't know, Sarah is really the idea person around here, and I'm her assistant/minion.  She had the idea of a fiesta, so therefore it was my job to come up with the rest of the "details" and make this sucker happen.  You know, like the food prep, decorating, and hiding the clutter picking up the house.

We had tacos, and it worked out so much better logistically than I thought it would.  The cuisine was great for the adults, not so much for the kids.  

Of course, I wanted to have a little something for the kiddos to do, since there would be 5 of them in attendance.  And since my neighbor Katie staged a completely awesome "egg volcano" and hunt on the Saturday before Easter. 

Seriously, my kids are STILL talking about the volcanoes.  

Anyway, maracas and pinatas came to mind as proper entertainment for a fiesta, so I got to work.  

The day of.  

And only had time for the maracas.  

They're just made out of leftover plastic eggs, rice for the inside, plastic spoons, and clear packing tape.  I got the how-to here.  

Here are the neighbor-ladies doing a little hat dance.

Working the mustaches.

Senoritas y mustaches

Mustaches and maracas are all well and good, but the real entertainment for the night came in the form the pool noodles/light sabers.

Here's our caballero riding in on his trusty steed, Noodle.

I hadn't invited our middle-school neighbors over with the intention of having them take the brunt of a pool noodle attack.  But, since they did and it worked out smashingly for all of us watching from the sidelines, I think I might ambush invite them over for Round 2.

Both factions in the Noodle Wars made peace over mustachioed cupcakes, and everybody went home sleepy and happy.  But not before Cruise Director Sarah turned off the lights on everybody and told them they had to leave when it got dark.

Baked, not burned.  Yay me.

It's a good thing, after a stressful and frustrating week, to be able to end on a high note.  

Will's Birthday

I know, I know, his birthday was two months ago, but it's still fun to look at the pictures, right? We had a "Cars" themed birthday, complete with checkered flag bunting, cardboard Tow Maters, and a balloon drop car wash.

I intentionally kept the guest list small to avoid the drama, so it was more like a glorified play date, but Will knew it was his day, so mission: accomplished.

Mike was in charge of photography, so, there you have it.

I still can't believe my baby is TWO.