Rory's is Five!

 We celebrated Rory's 5th birthday with a bunch of friends, and a fun party. It was supposed to have been a pool party, but the weather didn't cooperate, despite it being August, and so we parents were left scrambling an hour before party time, trying to come up with some games and other activities to entertain a group of 4-5 year olds for two and a half hours. Some of the games we did, I stole from Girls Camp, such as the cotton ball on the nose game.

And the threading spaghetti noodles game.

We also did a clothespin drop, and another game with clothespins, where you attach a few to each kid, and they have to chase each other around and try and collect as many clothespins from other kids as they can while protecting their own.

You may notice that Rory herself is not in a lot of these pictures. That's because she chose to be particularly grumpy for her party, and didn't want to participate with most of the games we played. Very odd for her, especially given how long, and how excitedly she'd talked about this day. We did get her to play giant beach volleyball.

Then it was time for lunch. Here is a great pic of Rory with all her guests.

After lunch came presents, which I think may have been the only reason Rory wanted a party. She got a couple of new Lego Friends sets, some clothes and toys, and some really cool arts and crafts stuff.

She also got this bad boy. Once you get proficient on it, you can actually throw sparks!

Next up was pinata time, which in and of itself was quite entertaining. Suffice it to say that five year olds and blindfolds don't work so well.

Finn tried a few times, but finally gave up and chucked the bat.

But it was Owen who finally brought it down, once we let them take the blindfold off. Check out his look of ultimate triumph on that pinata!

Then Rory got to blow out her candles, with a little help from her brother.

It was a fun, albeit exhausting couple of hours, especially given Rory's general uncooperativity but it ended well. Stay tuned for more birthday fun!