Whoa! He's Five.

One day you are in hospital about to give birth to a much anticipated child. The next, you wake up and he is FIVE! It all seems like the blink of an eye, but this morning my little baby woke up a Five year old Boy. Half a decade young. 

We had a great little party yesterday, far less stress and work than last year. I'm getting smarter at getting organised and this year I just didn't want the huge wedding-ness of last year. 

I would give you the verbal full on run down in one shot but I'm afraid you'd be comatose by the end so instead let me give you the back story and a sequence of events and the food. 

The plan was to have 10 kids and a pool party. The list expanded to include a few others I hadn't thought of and so that number went up to 14. The tropical weather put paid to the idea of doing everything informally by the pool. We woke up to heavy rain so called the management office and asked for the function room. Luckily it was available so we hastily set it up. 

Sequence of events (not like I imagined but as they turned out):

10: kids arrive and they all put a paw to canvas (activity plus return present).

10.15: pin the patch on Kwazii.

This is a pin the patch game. The idea taken from Pinterest and made one evening last week. I cut out 15 patches and Kid spent an afternoon colouring each one. I popped a little peel-able tack behind each and then at the party when blindfolded the tack was peeled and the patch applied.

10.30: Sponge bucket game: two teams / 4 buckets/ getting the water from one bucket to the other using the sponge. Super fun! 

10.40: all headed to the pool. I hung around for the most part but went back to the function room at 11.20 to set up the food. 

11.40: 14 hungry kids, dry and starving from all that pool fooling around, had this to eat: 

That's 'Sea cucumbers' (cucumbers), 'fishies' (fish crackers), 'sand'wiches (buns with butter and cheese), 'Beach Balls' (apples and oranges), 'Sea mud Squares' (brownies), 'Deep Sea' Jello and 'Take a dip (tortilla chips and salsa). 

This followed by pizza and then this amazing jellyfish piñata my friend made:

Then it was cake (another post) followed by the fun game: water balloons

Forgot to say, this is Kwazii cat from the Octonauts - ties loosely to the underwater theme. I was going for. The other side of the box says 'Shiver me whiskers!!'. I made this between his bus leaving at 8.30am and 9.30am on Friday (when I had to leave to go help bake the cake). On the day we used it for the kids to stand in and take pictures and then the kids pelted it with water balloons. It's more rudimentary than the picture looks but it worked a treat. It was sopping wet and disintegrated by the end but the kids loved it! 

12.45: get a goody bag and pop in the canvas handprint and say bye bye thanks for coming to my party! This is the fronts of the bags - cut out octopus/ pufferfish/ seahorse/ dolphin, all coloured by Kid and his Brother P last Sunday. Then stuck on the bags and googly eyes added on. Small note of thanks included in the bag with two tiny packs of M&M's and a vehicle shaped ceramic money box. 

The backs of the bags were decorated with foam stickers. 

Clear up and then home were we all collapsed in small heaps to recover. Kid and his brother built some Lego while I tried to sort out the various bags and bits and bobs that had come back from the party. 

It's the 6th today and he is FIVE today. We are having a family day with visiting grandparents, V's brother, his wife and my nephew (said brother P) and a friend visiting from London. We are off to have a swim and lunch and then follow a few birthday rituals like cake and presents. Laters!