Arrrrrr Matey!

This weekend we finally celebrated Will's birthday with his friends.  Will wanted a pirate themed party  which I was so excited about.  There are some great pirate party ideas out there so I couldn't resist and went a little crazy with the planning.  We invited 26 kids (not including my two) expecting that we'd have a good number of declines since it was the first weekend of April vacation.   Well, I was definitely wrong about that and all but three said they could come.  So we ended up with 24 little kids (mostly boys),  about 20 adults and 5 siblings at our house for the party.   Thank the lord the weather ended up in our favor otherwise I'm not quite sure what we would have done.  

What would a pirate party be without a pirate themed invite.  Everyone received a message in the bottle invitation to get the pirate theme going. 

Day of the party, we had a sign welcoming everyone when they arrived.

The kids got to dress up as a pirate with bandana, hat, eyepatch, sword and even a tattoo!  

Will and Jack all dressed up before everyone arrived.  Pirate shirts courtesy of Grandma and Judu.

The dessert table.

Pirate ship cupcakes.  I found a really cute free template online that I just had to print out and cut.  The internet is a fabulous place.

Pirate ship cookies for all the kids to take home.

When the kids arrived, they went on a treasure dig.  They were given a list of treasure items to find in the sandbox.  The kids really seemed to enjoy this!

The first game of the day....Walk the Plank!

Here is half the group at the start of the party. This was all I could wrangle into a photo so I had to go with it.

The craziness began right after this photo was taken and any hope of getting other pictures quickly went to the wayside.  Trying to have any sort of calmness with 24 kids running around with swords is near impossible.  So we went with it and the kids had a blast.  We were able to run the games and the highlight of the day was the pinata.  Looking back on the party, I could have handed the kids swords and let them go at it for 1.5 hours and they would have been happy. 

Once everyone left, my friend grabbed my camera and took a couple pictures.  I wish I had thought of handing my camera to someone else earlier.  Oh well!  Everyone had fun but I am happy this party is behind us!  Not a good idea to start planning almost 2 months ahead of time...way too much time to think about things!  

Happy month long birthday Will!