One thing I love about 4 year olds in general and my four year old specifically is their love of costumes. Owen wanted a pirate party, and luckily we have a pirate costume:
I found bandanas, eye patches, and pirate tattoos for ridiculously cheap at oriental trading company (ps: environment, exploited chinese laborers - lets just get this out of the way now. I apologize.) and as the kids came in we got them get dressed as pirates.
I started the party by reading "How I turned into a pirate". I saw this at another party and thought it was a great strategy. that was a superhero party and when we got there the birthday boy's mom read a superhero book, which got all the kids in the superhero theme. It went really well.
Next, I had the kids decorate brown paper bags with pirate stamps, stickers, and markers (to later use as goody bags when we broke the pinata). I spent a lot of time rounding up pirate art supplies, including stamps and stickers, and expected this activity would last at least 20 minutes. Definitely not. It was well recieved but the kids spent five minutes each on their bags and announced they were done and went back to swashbuckling with balloon swords. Oh, well. Either way it was fun, though I suspect if it were girls this activity would have lasted longer.
Next I had planned a beanbag toss and a pinata. The beanbag toss was fun although none of the kids paid any attention to the line we had taped on the floor to stand behind and throw the beanbags. They all stood about 6 inches from it and then expected to be praised for getting all three beanbags in. We did the pinata next, which was awesome. One kid ended up going bananas on it and it broke in a very satisfying explosion of more pirate tattoos, chocolate dubloons, ring pops and plastic dinosours (again, oriental trading company is a party planner's friend).
Next came cake. The cake! Andy had made this totally awesome pirate cake last night, which took him forever and was truly a work of art, with multiple poop decks and some serious cake architecture, but sadly: the weight of the two sides of the cake boat were too much for the frosting and the whole thing came apart spectacularly at about 9:15 pm. We had to completely redo the cake (and by we, I mean, Andy had to completely redo the cake and I drank wine, kept up a running commentary on how great the first cake was, and did a 10pm run to CVS for more frosting). The second cake still came out great:
I had planned for all this to take the 2 hours of the party. ha! all of the above took 1 hour and that's a stretch with me dragging my feet before cake trying to figure out what else to do. Lesson learned: NEVER overestimate the attention spans of 4 year olds. After cake came about an hour of wild running around, swashbuckling, and just general 4 year old hillarity - (also a couple meltdowns and one potty accident, but really, far less than might be expected in a free-for-all of 9 kids) and overall everyone had a great time.
After everyone went home, Owen said it had been the best time ever, which Andy and I took to mean the party was a success. And we gratefully wash our hands of any more birthday celebrations for a year.
ARRRRRRGH!
