Brylee's Birthday

Brylee has been looking forward to her first friends birthday party since Tucker had his a year ago! Seriously! With her birthday being December 21 and most of her friends belonging to a student families, no one was here near her birthday. Well, while I was working on things for a bridal shower she reminded me that she needed to have her birthday party with friends. She was set on it being an 'art' party like Tucker had last year and that she wanted the same cake. Well I realized that I had to throw her party that weekend (5 days away) if I was going to do it because I had the bridal shower the weekend after, and then Tucker's birthday the weekend after that! So we invited the friends knowing that some sort of craft would be involved. Come Wednesday I was able to get her to agree to a pirate theme and have everyone decorate treasure boxes. 

Here are friends at the table gluing jewels and coloring their treasure boxes (candy boxes from JoAnns)

Everyone got to decorate their own pirate hat and they all sat while I read "Pirate Pete's Talk Like a Pirate" to everyone. 

After the story we needed to go on a treasure hunt but first we had to find the pieces of the treasure map amongst all the cannon fire from the enemy. 

In this first video Tucker helps me realize that the wooden chair needed to be moved to make popping the cannon balls (balloons) safer, poor kid. Thankfully, it only hurt for a moment and he went back to popping more ballons.

I eventually had to hold a pen to the balloons while the kids tried to sit on them and pop them because some of them just don't displace the air well enough

And then they headed out the door for the hunt. Tucker was the leader and it was a little hard for the 3 and 4 year olds to understand exactly what the they were doing but they were all glad to find the treasure. 

Inside the treasure box was REAL money. The children each got a turn to hunt for the money among all the beans with a blindfold on. It turned out to be rather tricky. The bigger kids tried to go too fast and dropped tons of pennies while sifting through the beans. Brylee seemed to get it pretty well and made out with 10 pennies :)

Then we all ate pizza...

and ate cake. This is a treasure chest cake and looks the coolest from the front :)

Finally she got presents. I'm thinking after this party we will tell kids to just come have fun and not bring presents because really my kids don't need more stuff. (I let them bring Brylee presents because she has seen her brothers get presents and was kind of expecting it for her first party, hopefully Gunnar will have a different view when he turns 4 in a year and a half)