A "Toad"-ally Fun Birthday!

Last week, my brother Sam had a break from BYU-Idaho and was able to come down and spend time with us! He did a lot of fun things with the kids (so I could work on Spring Festival) and helped in the yard, too. We loved having him here!


Joshua was sad that Sam couldn't stay for his birthday, so we decided to do our family celebration a little early while Sam was still here. Joshua chose to go to Pirate Island. We had fun eating pizza, getting balloon animals, and playing arcade games.


Joshua had a small friend party on his real birthday. He LOVES Super Mario Bros Wii right now, so we chose that as the theme. We kept it pretty simple because a) I'm not hugely creative when it comes to games and parties, and b) it's the last couple of weeks before Spring Festival and I'm really busy with that. I learned that simple for 5 year-olds is the way to go . . . not a lot of work for me, and they loved it!

The party started with doing some Mario Bros coloring pages that I printed off. They were enjoying this so much that I let it go almost 30 minutes, instead of the 10-15 I had planned.


Then Joshua opened his presents from his friends, followed by cake and ice cream. I had suggested Toad cupcakes (Blue Toad is his favorite character in the game), but Joshua was insistent that I make a cake because he wanted "to cut Toad up into pieces!"



Next we went out to the driveway for the pinata. I was amazed that they were able to bang it enough to get all of the candy out of the bottom, but the pinata itself stayed pretty much in tact! (See the picture where they are all picking up the candy . . . it's hard to tell the pinata was open.) Since there were only 4 kids, they each got a pretty good amount of loot to take home.





We finished the party by doing the only other thing there is to do at a Super Mario Bros Wii party: playing Super Mario Bros on the Wii!



Our family celebrated the evening of his birthday by eating more of the Toad cake and giving Joshua some presents: gumballs to refill his little gumball machine, a bike helmet that looks like a fierce shark, and a training-wheel bike.

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Happy Birthday, Joshua!