Daniel turns 5

Friends

Well, it happened - Mr. D is actually 5 years old. It's hard to believe that it's really been 5 years, but sure enough it has.

The little man was celebrated in two rounds - first at home on his actual birthday, and then today at the neighborhood park with his friends. We'd invited his preschool class and some other friends, and ended up with close to 100% acceptance rate, so with siblings and parents there were just about 50 people.

On Daniel's birthday, he went to lunch with Eric at a local Chinese restaurant, and had squid, which he then followed up with a birthday dinner wish of "Fish with their heads on". He does love his seafood.

On his birthday, he was allowed to open one package before dinner, and chose the one that arrived that day from Oregon. The monster truck was very popular, as were the books. After dinner he got to open the rest, and got a big kick out of the boat and legos from Norway. The cash he got from grandma babe is getting spent $1 at a time for matchbox cars...

And then there was the big 5-year-old party at the local park. Refusing to learn from last year when we just about gave all of the kids hypothermia, we scheduled an outdoor birthday in the spring. And it was looking pretty bleak a few days before the event, with possible snow predicted, but in the end we got lucky and it was high-50s and partially clouded.

Daniel wanted a Star Wars party, so that's what he got. Invitations went out to his classmates and a few family friends, and with better than expected response rate (and siblings), there were 29 kids who RSVP'ed and they all came.

Each kid got a jedi outfit and a lightsaber, took their picture with Yoda and then ran around the park for a bit.

Then there was pizza and "Yoda Soda" (Sprite with lime sherbert), followed by "Jedi training".

There were three events for the Jedi training. First to learn control of the lightsaber, the kids were given a balloon and asked to use the lightsaber to bounce it across a field....

In retrospect, we should have thought about the wind and the pine trees... Most of the balloons ended up blowing into a tree and popping...

Then there was teamwork training, where two and two jedis were tied together and had to do a three-legged race up the hill.

And finally, there was blaster training, where they got to shoot nerf guns at a cutout of Darth Vader.

Darth himself showed up at the end of training, did battle with the newly-trianed jedis, and lost... (though he'll go on record saying that he didn't feel he could use all of his powers against 5-year-olds).

And there was cake. And more swordfights. And a few tears, but no-one left unhappy.

And most importantly, the birthday boy himself had a great time.

All of the pictures we took at the event can be found HERE.

Happy birthday Mr. D - we love you.

Love, A(D)RE.

(This post was originally funnier and actually available on Sunday after the party, but blogger ate my text. The editor is grumpy).