First Sleepover.

Well you heard about the birthday boy, so now you get to hear about and see the birthday party.  For his eighth party, Addison really wanted to have his first sleepover.  We thought about it for a while, knowing we would have a new baby, and wondered if we could pull that off.  We concluded that we're not really sleeping a lot anyway, and it would only be a few boys that are super sweet kids, so we decided to go for it.

I'm happy to say this event went down in the books as a big success.  The kids had fun, we had fun and enjoyed visiting with the parents while they were there, they actually slept (with only a small threat from Chris finally at about 2:30am), and the baby cooperated, mostly :) Except when we were trying to clean the house before the party- he must have sensed this event was not about him!  Actually, I think Jaxon slept as much as the boys did, in a different time frame! Of course, after the fact, Addison informed us that he and another boy did in fact stay up until 4:00.  His big thing the whole time was that he was going to stay up all night.  I let him know that it was indeed called a "sleepover", not a "stay-up-all-night-over".  It was laid back and enjoyable.  The only parts that weren't laid back were self-inflicted (as they usually are), because the aforementioned (in the last post) perfectionist parents stressed over details such as planning and executing excellent party activities (Chris), and decorating and making a from scratch character cake (myself).  I have unintentionally set some kind of precedent for myself with making the birthday cakes now... I think it started with Cadence's third b-day party and I made a rocket cake for her Little Einsteins party.  I haven't looked back since, and now I just can't bring myself to get one made at the store, even if I just make cupcakes.  It would certainly be easier not to do that, but now that's just too easy, isn't it...

Enjoy the party in pics!

 My party boy, all dressed up in his Phineas and Ferb t-shirt to match the party.

The set up...It was a Phineas and Ferb theme- a cute cartoon about two brothers that make elaborate inventions and creations during summer vacation.

We had a create your own sundae bar and the test tubes made fizzy flavored drinks- the bad guy on the cartoon is an evil scientist so we went with that theme.

Is that the biggest pizza you've ever seen??  And yes, Cadence did come to the party wearing a crown and fairy wings (seen in the above right pic)

And here is the Perry the Platypus cake.  In the cartoon, he is the boys' pet who does nothing except make animal noises and has this goofy boxy look to him.  But the boys don't know that he is really a secret agent known as Agent P who fights the evil scientist.

Chris, the grand master of ceremonies, put the kids in two teams and they played bean bag toss tic tac toe in the backyard and then came inside for a "Where's Perry?" Scavenger Hunt.  The kids really had fun with the hunt- they were running all over like crazy!

The last part of the hunt included finding these items and then coming together and building an invention out of the materials they found.  As you can see, this team got some help from little sisters :)

 This was around 11:00 ish or so, after some hard play and fun.  The two little brothers went home after the party activities. We settled them down to a movie in the hopes they would fall asleep.  Well, the one on the far left, Liam, went out (He was the youngest).  For the others, it was the threat at 2:30am that got them to quiet down :)  But really, how cute is that- all in their little sleeping bags.  My son's face looked very happy all night.  So my face was happy all night.  This is the stuff of being a kid.

 Peace out from the Pate house.