Happy FIFTH Birthday Week: Secret Agent Magician Party

This years party theme revoloved around a magician that incorporated a secret agent identity theme. John was all about it. Since it was the big 5.0 and he kept changing his mind on which classmates he wanted to invite, we settled on all of them. And then of course his neighborhood friends and a few from the soccer team.... I only got 2 "no" rsvps. As such, we had 20 children at a drop off party at our house. Thank the good Lord for grandparents, aunts and great friends and a couple of parents that ended up staying at the party. It has been 5 days since the party and I think I am still recovering.

Carl and I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning turning the hallway and living room into a tunnel and spy headquarters. The kids got invitations that told them a password ("dragons") that they had to use to get in the agency. Granddaddy greeted the families at the door and sure enough, they all remembered. Carl sat in the HQ and handed out badges and branded their agent numbers on their arms and fingerprinted them. They were supposed to then go to their first mission. This became a huge bottleneck, so we improvised.

The Magician arrived 30 minutes into the party and put on a great show. The kids were entertained and John was taking part (I was afraid he would shy up) and being the volunteer. The kids seemed to really enjoy it.

Then we went upstairs for the 2nd two training missions. 1) Get through the laser field and 2) target practice with nerf guns. Both activities seemed to go well. Their were adults running around even more than the kids trying to set up for dinner and cake downstairs as well as man the two mission stations. It was crazy to say the very least.

Finally it was pizza and cake time. I over estimated how long I could keep them entertained, so we did have about 10-15 minutes of free time after cake before parents came to pick up. Which, in kid world where they were not allowed back upstairs to just free play, was a REALLY long time.

I failed one mission that I will never forget. One of the mom's was trying to figure out if her son was having adverse reaction to a certain dye. So she emailed me ahead of time and asked about the menu as well as to tell me she was sending him his own cupcake.... which sat on my counter unopened until she got there. In the mean time, he not only had our cupcakes, but he also had a cookie. awesome.

Here are several pictures from the event. I have to say thank you to Ashlea and Abbey for helping me to capture this fleeting moment in time as I did not pick up my camera one time. It means the world to me! I can not figure out how to do the slideshow show anymore from picasa (if someone wants to help me out there, that would be great), so in the mean time, here is a long string of pictures.