Erik's Big Day

My baby boy turns four on Monday and since school starts this week I thought it best to throw his birthday party before school started rather than wait. Having an end of August birthday presents some challenges, but I seem to always go in the same direction, water! I can usually count on it being hot enough to swim, even when renting a place 6 weeks early. So I took a risk, since we had never had a birthday party thrown here, but rented a wading pool for a morning at a local park. The beauty is that I could invite as many people as I wanted and there was a park and wading pool for constant entertainment so we were set.

When deciding on the cake I was a little surprised by Erik's choice, he went for the rainbow, then I realized it was because he loves the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" because I sing it to him a lot. So the theme was pretty simple, we stuck with "somewhere over the rainbow". This is my first park party so I didn't go crazy and knew there was only so much I could do theme wise. I had multi-colored decorations and made a rainbow themed fruit platter and that's about it. There really wasn't much I could do with the location and what we had planned.

I could only include so many pictures on my blog, click here for all the of the pictures if you are curious.

 

The wading pools went really well. It seems like the kids really enjoyed themselves inside and outside of the water and were constantly entertained. I saw lots of smiles and didn't witness many tantrum and no random families tried to come over and swim in the pool. We started at 10:30 and the morning was a bit overcast, but by 11:15 it was a gorgeous sunny 80 degree day and perfect for our party.

 

The birthday boy seemed to enjoy himself, he spent some moments playing tag and spending times with some of his friends.

Elliot had a good time too and really enjoyed the company of a few friends of his that were there. He did need to take a moment to regroup and step away from the party because he did get overwhelmed.

Then there is the big birthday cake, the main attraction of any party. Silly me actually forgot a lighter! My friend Jen went to one of the neighboring parties who were throwing a bbq and borrowed one for us. Thanks a million Jen, so Erik was able to blow out the candles on his birthday cake.

Latetly, here are a few pictures of some of our friends who made this day really special for us. Thank you everyone you come out and celebrated with us.

Oh and I thought we could get away with not opening the presents at the party and Erik was obsessed with them so it was unavoidable. I had packed most of them in our car... A special thanks to Annie who sat there and kept track of everything for me so I could get my thank you cards straight.