To infinity and beyond...4th birthday party

Happy Birthday to my special boy. He wanted to have a buzz lightyear party, so thanks to pinterest I found a lot of creative ways to make that happen. We set up a photo booth for all the kids to have fun dressing up as  a character and taking pictures behind the etch a sketch. 

For the food table I made a watermelon rocket. It was supposed to have melon balls put back in, but they didn't come out as nice, so we just displayed the melon rocket  in front of the sliced melons. 

 The above cake was a pinterest idea. It came from here. It is layered chocolate cake surrounded by kit kat bars held on by icing and filled with little chocolate candies on top.  I knew I wouldn't get it round, so I went square.  Notice the 'moon' pops (4 of them) around the cake.

 For games we found a free printable Toy Story bingo game. The kids loved it and Preston tied for 1st place. It was a fun way to gather the friends and get them in the party mood.  For bingo chips we took the pieces from our connect 4 toy story game.

 We also made a life size Mr. Potato head out of cardboard. We used this for 2 games. The first game was a bean bag toss. We had cut a hole out behind the nose so when we removed the nose everyone got 3 trys to get their beanbag in the hole. Everyone had a GREAT time. Prestons friend Andrew won this game.

 Next we took off all the Mr Potato head parts and blind folded each child. They each got a turn placing the face parts back on the the Mr Potato. We then took a picture of each child with their recreated Potato Head.

Preston wasn't very excited about being blind folded, but loved seeing what his potato head looked like when the blind fold was off.

 Finally I had spent days making a pinata with a balloon and newspaper. I would mix flour and water into a paste and then take little strips of newspaper and put it all over the balloon. I think I got 4 layers on it. I would recomend giving this project a week, I only had 3 days, so it wasn't as dry as I wanted it to be. When it was finished I used the rest of the wrapping paper we had to decorate the outside. I filled the pinata with candy and trinkets. All the kids had fun beating it and Tim managed not to get hit by any of the zealous kids.

 Preston used his woody hat to collect his pinata goodies.

 We all sang Happy Birthday and he blew out his candles. Afterward he opened up his presents. The kids all had fun and so did we.

 To Infinity and Beyond

Before we knew it the day was over and we were exhausted. 

Preston turned 3

For Prestons birthday this year we had a big train theme. I decided to make a ginger bread train to compliment the mini train cakes I already planned to make (thank you Renee H. for sending the cake pan out). To make the ginger bread train, I cut out the pattern from cardboard, then rolled out my ginger bread dough (recipe from this book),placed my pattern cut outs on dough then cut and baked. When the ginger bread came out of the oven I put my pattern pieces back on to make sure the edges were straight so we didn't have a crooked train. When the ginger bread was completely cooled we put it together with quick butter cream icing, and decorated with candy.

I put some crackers inside the train engine to support the round cookies. Preston sorted through the M & M's to find the red and green ones. We then used little Hershey bars for the coal cart. the poles sticking out were 3 HUGE candles for singing Happy Birthday (more like flames).

We even had a lumbar cart with chocolate sticks and pretzels. We had a lot of fun making our ginger bread train. That was the day before his birthday. Pictures of his birthday are still to come.