Logan's 8th Birthday Party

We had Logan's party on 5-31 at Austin's Park. Yes, I know. Logan's party was almost 2 weeks before his birthday(6-11). Heck, it wasn't even in the same month, but there is a method to my madness! You see Logan has a "summer birthday". Any of you with summer birthday's can probably relate to this. Once school's out, everyone forgets about your birthday. It's a total gip. My birthday's July 25th and I never once had a birthday with friends from school because it was too hard to get everyone together in the summer and where we lived, it wasn't like everyone was down the block anyway. At least that was my parents lame excuse for never having a party for me other than the family party with my grandparents, aunt and cousins. If you can't tell I have a few issues with my childhood, but I digress.
From my own experience as a mother with Logan and Ellie's parties, I can tell you people definitely seem to forget to come to parties once school's out. Hence the early party for Logan this year. We had a good turn out, so I guess our theory seems to be correct.

Logan's been wanting to have his party at Austin's park for about 3 years now. I finally said yes and decided to have separate parties for Logan and Ellie for the first time since before she was born and Logan had to share his 3rd birthday with her baby shower. They haven't minded sharing. It was really all they ever knew. But I decided that Austin's park wasn't really appropriate for a 5th birthday and Ellie didn't really want hers there anyway. So Ellie's having a pool party at our neighborhood clubhouse on Friday afternoon.
For anyone thinking of having a party there, I did not like it at all! I think the kids had fun, which is what's important, but I didn't. For one thing, the party rooms are upstairs away from everything and we only had the room for an hour. So basically the kids got there, ate pizza (which was brought up with pitchers of soda, had cake (or in Logan's case donuts), and left the room to play downstairs. That was it for the party. We had to clear everything out of the room and I never saw several of the kids again. It was next to impossible to give them their goody bags because I couldn't do it before they left the room since they would have to carry them around the whole time they played and rode the rides . So what was I supposed to do with them? Carry them around the whole time and try and catch people on their way out? Quite frustrating. So I wound up asking the front desk to keep them for me and anytime I saw someone from our party leaving I would run up and get them one. Crazy.

Logan's not a huge fan of cake or cookies. So last year after his birthday, I decided that for this birthday we would do donuts. I told him we could get a bunch of donuts and make a donut tower! He thought this was a great idea. Then recently we found out that Round Rock donuts makes a giant donut. We decided that Logan would definitely need this, but he still wanted the tower too. So I got 2 giants (one glazed and one with chocolate) and 2 dozen regular size. The morning of the party I decided to put the 2 giants together and make an "8" for Logan's 8th birthday! Let me just say we had waaaay too many donuts. But Logan liked it.

It may not look like it, but they are actually having fun!

One fun thing I did was to take this picture (below) and make it into a thank you card using Walmart's one hour photo. I had them ready the next day to give out to the kid's in Logan's class. Much easier than writing thank you notes to everyone and this way they each have a picture of the party to remember!

Logan's party went pretty smoothly with just a few snags. Wish me luck with Ellie's on Friday! If any of you reading this are able to come to the party, let me know and of course you are welcome. I figured Friday at 11 would be hard for some of you to get to, but that's the only time I could get our pool reserved!!