Ace Turns (TURNED) Four!

I totally cop to the fact that I found the idea for Ace's 4th birthday party on a friend's blog (Thanks Em!). We had Superhero Training Camp. I hardly took any pictures and the ones I did take were AWFUL. (New camera, here I come.)

I loved the invitations. I found these cute portfolios which looked like covert operative's folders.

They opened to reveal the training camp details.

I made a bunch of signs at each training station.

1. They had to make a cape.

2. They brought their cape to me and got shut into the phone booth to become superheroes.

There was a door cut out of the back of the phonebooth where I changed them into their cape and gave them their superhero mask. I've had numerous comments from moms since then that they haven't been able to get the capes off the kids. Love it!

3. They had to shoot down the bad guys out of the windows. (We cut windows out of some wardrobe boxes we painted and set some toy soldiers up that they could shoot with water guns.) Ace will tell you that this was his favorite part of the party. It was water gun mania most of the time.

4. They had to rescue babies. I drew babies on some hard boiled eggs and they had to carry them in a spoon around and back to the beginning without dropping them. All I can say is that it's a good thing these kids aren't in charge of rescue ops. My boiled eggs were pretty smashed up by the end of the party.

5. The kids got to throw a pie plate with whip cream in "the bad guy's" face. My dad ran around the party smashing cascarones (eggs filled with confetti) on all the kids heads. He was our villian. The kids LOVED throwing pie in his face. They all went back three and four times. He was a GREAT sport and was a huge hit.

The other stations I didn't photograph:

6. They had to shoot bazookas through two hanging hula hoops.

7. They had to walk the balance beam and punch out two bop bags.

8. They had to throw ping pong balls into buckets.

9. We had a bunch of cardboard bricks that they were supposed to build up and knock down but (as is typical of ALL Ace's birthdays) we had some extreme weather (wind this time) and there was no way those blocks would have stayed put. As it was, everything was staked and duct-taped in place.
At each station, there was a bag of adhesive-backed felt stars that they could stick onto their capes.

Ace insisted on a Transformers cake (scream! I didn't even get a picture of it).

10. They had to find three balls marked with a black "X" in the bounce house.

Ace's friend Claire is my hope for Lily Kate. She knocked around with the best of the boys and her bow didn't even MOVE!

He was totally pooped after it was over.

And our little miss had a special outfit too!

It may have been 30 hours of prep for a one-hour party but it was all worth it when I went to Mom's Night at school on Thursday and on the wall they had asked the kids why they loved their mommies. On Ace's, he had told the teacher "because she plans my birthday party."