The Party

For their birthday party we just had a pool party in our backyard. The only catch was that there is a rule in the kindergarten that if you are going to pass out invitations at school you have to give one to everyone. I didn't know any of the parents of the girls' school friends and the only way to get invites to them was to pass out invitations at school. But our experience at other parties was that only 4 or 5 kids from the class would show up. But my girls are in separate classes so that meant handing out 45 invitations and hoping less than half of that would show up. All in all, we had about 20 kids show up. Plus several of the parents stayed to help which I really appreciated. We just got watermelon and little ceasers pizza and had cake and ice cream. All the kids just played in the pool, ate and played some more. Jake, Jono, and I took turns life guarding, plus several parents got in the pool and we had adult friends that came and swam too. It turned out really well. It was a fairly simple but really fun party.
We also realized how awesomely set up our backyard is for parties. In the hottest part of the day the playground is in the shade and the pool is in full sun and the whole concrete area is shaded. So we set up tables all under the big pine tree and it just worked out perfect. Kids could go back and forth from playing in the pool to playing on the swingset. It also made me grateful for tile floors throughout the house! These are just a few shots of people eating and hanging out at the party:




This is the Mortenson group. I thought it was funny that all the kids from Lyla's class were hanging out together by the fence like the cool crowd.



They got a lot of presents, next year I want to someway make it so that people only bring a present for either Lyla or Mckayla, it was just a lot of stuff. The kids all ended up having at it with whomever was left (we didn't do present opening as part of the party), but we didn't unbox everything. They get to choose a new thing here and there so we can make the newness last. I just felt like it was too much for them to have all at once. So we have a toys-r-us in their closet right now.
This is the cake I made. I am not a crafty or artistic person, but I do want food to taste good. I did a red velvet cake and made a raspberry filling for it and did a cream cheese frosting. Only I couldn't keep the filling from oozing out, so it really became a raspberry-cream cheese frosting. It was good though.