Shared party

Hudson & Bryce are brothers whose birthdays fall one year and 10 days apart.  Since they share the same friends, and their birthdays fall during the summer when everyone is busy, it makes most sense to create a shared celebration.

We threw a birthday party for our three-year-old boy/girl twins at our home in June. We had food and drinks inside and a huge “castle” made out of cardboard boxes outside for the kids. The party was very casual and unstructured; people went in and out as they pleased, we opened presents at one point and then let all of the kids play with all of the toys, and we had a bunch of cupcakes (that people ate whenever they wanted) instead of a formal cake.

For my sons’ 4th and 2nd birthdays we had a pirate party. Upon arrival the children were offered felt vests, a bandana, a fabric sash, an eye patch, a telescope and a loot box. They were then directed over to the buried treasure to look for items that were inside the loot box (to ensure that everyone got some of everything). Once everyone had arrived we popped ‘cannonballs’. I filled up some balloons with prizes (stickers and candy bracelets) and they had to run around and pop them all to find the prizes. Following that we had a cannonball fight, we had built pirate ships out of washer and dryer sized boxes with rivets and plans from www.mrmcgroovys.com and the cannonballs were balls out of our ball pit. We ended the party by having a scavenger hunt for our loot, apparently some pesky pirates hid it =) Along the way we ate lunch of some golden nuggets (chicken nugget platter from Chick-Fil-A), pieces of eight (french fries, also from Chick-Fil-A), some treasure mix (some homemade trail mix with gummy fish in them) and some fish food (gummy worms). All the photos were taken by Betsy of http://bmullinaxphotography.com