Owen and Emmett's birthday parties

This year I told the kids that they could have a birthday party with their friends as long as they planned it all out and I had minimal work to do for it, and they have been so excited to be in charge of their own parties! But since Emme is only four, there was a lot of Mom help needed for his party.

 

Poor Owen had his party pushed back from November all the way until January just because we kept being so busy - first Thanksgiving, then a trip to Utah for his baptism and Christmas, followed by New Years...so here it is, the end of January and he finally is getting his friend party that he has been planning for months! I thought it might be easier for everyone if we did his and Emmett's on the same day - that way we only had to decorate once, deep clean the house for company once, clean up afterwards once...see, easier!

 

Emmett wanted a monster party, and Owen wanted an animal/nature party, so the two themes clashed a little, but since the kids were in charge of planning it, I let them run with their ideas. They loved decorating the house and planning the foods.

 Owen used some ideas from his cub scout book and checked off a couple of arrow points with the things he came up with. He had one game where the kids took turns throwing sicky lizards at balloons and whichever balloon their lizard stuck to, they got to take down and pop for the candy treasure inside.

Some of the kids didn't like the noise, but were still determined to get to the candy inside! It was fun watching all the ways they came up with for popping the balloons! Some jumped on them, some sat on them, some used their teeth, Owen tried using his "claws", and one little girl simply took it to her mom and had her mom pop it for her!

 

He also made a bean bag toss, with Teagan's help. Emme wanted it to look like a scary monster and Owen wanted a tiger, so they worked together and this is what they came up with:

It was a lot of fun and the bigger kids at Owen's party had a great time beating it up after the games were all finished.

 

Emmett's party was first that morning. He helped decorate his own cupcakes by drawing the faces on the frosting. He only had three little friends over, so it was a nice, small get together for him.

 

Everyone got to pick their own color monster cupcake to eat - Emme chose the orange footed guy. 

This is his best friend, Janelle. She just turned six and he was pretty convinced that he was turning six too since she had.

 We had googley eyes all over the room and all over the food containers and silverware...everything looked very monster-ish indeed! Emme's contribution to the decoration had to be hung on the blinds behind the food table... he says it is a guy on a boat and an air plane...not sure how that fits in with the rest of his monsters, but he made them all by himself and so they had to be displayed!

 

 He also helped decorate the juice bags to look like little monsters, too! I thought they turned out great - almost too cute to drink.

 And then we had little monster goodie bags for the guests to take home from his party, and they were a big hit as well!

 This is the monster Owen made to help decorate for Emme's party:

Half an hour after Emme's party, Owen's started. We had enough time to clean a bit from the monster theme, and organize Owen's things, and his friends started arriving. He had about 9 friends show up.

They played the games as well, laughed, ran around, and had fun. They loved the pizza and red velvet cake Owen had. Owen in turn, loved being the host for the morning and had a ball opening the gifts he got.

 After it was said and done, when asked what was his favorite part of the party, he said he loved playing the games best of all and I think it might have been because he had put forth the effort to make them himself and he was proud to see all his friends enjoying something that he had worked hard on.

It was a LONG morning, hosting two parties back-to-back,  but now that they are done and over with and the kids are revelling in the memories they made today, I can see that it was worth it!