Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman Birthday Party

This post is precisely a month late (the party was on April 20th), but I had to write this before posting about last Sunday's party. In my defense, most pictures were taken with my brother-in-law's camera and he had to send me the CDs with them.

Lots of people came to Kelvin's party -- his friends from school, from church, neighbors and former neighbors. The party was jam-packed with activities, led by my dear, long-suffering husband ;-) (thanks honey, my apologies again for being so busy with the food ). In the picture above, the kids are playing some traditional Brazilian games in our front lawn. Maybe they exist here too, but I'd have to ask someone about it. Oh, how about you? This particular game is called "lenço atrás" [handkerchief behind] and the participants sit in a circle while one one of them walks around and stealthily drops a handkerchief (or any piece of fabric) behind someone, who then has to run after the first person and try to catch him/her before s/he reaches the original seating place. If the person is caught s/he does the catching, if not, the first person has to go again -- do you have that here? Birthday boy had fun, and waited for his turn.

Here you can see my husband landing in his spot before our friend Karla caught him.

After these games outside, the kids moved to "Studio G" in the garage. Poor K, who had never watched a Fetch! episode in his life, printed out several activities from the website for the children to do. If you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see that the "mailbox" on the left was the cat carrier -- I don't even know if they used, it though. All the activities were done in a competition between boys and girls. I must note that only the older kids got involved in this activity.



The younger ones, like my nephews in matching shirts, played at the sand table or rode bikes or scooters on the driveway.

The reason K had to be in charge of all activities with the kids was that I still had to frost the cake and help with the cooking. Here you can see me applying butter cream frosting to the cake (after all these birthday cakes I've become a pro). The cake itself was a big failure, it tasted OK, but it was really hard. I used the same cake that Caroline made for Ben's birthday, but I guess the problem is that I tripled the recipe. :-(


The failed cake. I was too tired to color some of the frosting for his name, so I just used jelly beans (Sunburst).

Obviously, my sister-in-law was in charge of the decoration. She made two Ruff Ruffmans out of poster board. Here's the first one (the second was in the garage, see photo above), with Kelvin's name in Fetch! style (the white dots were made with chalk!! -- you can click to enlarge):
(she also smartly made a Happy Birthday banner to cover the ugliest border in history -- it's GONE! I can't wait to post about it).

Happy Birthday, Kelvin!

Smiling for grandma's camera after blowing the candles:

After the happy birthday, K was so tired of entertaining the kids that he didn't even stop to think that they had not had time to eat. Smart parents either brought them in or brought food to them outside (I did have food at a table in the family room, next to the garage, so kids could get food there), of course those who were hungry and not completely engrossed in play, came in to eat, look at my nephew here: At this party we had the very first Piñata ever at our house (we don't much like to give out candy, I know, mean people, our family), and of course it was a big hit (K bought an empty one and filled it with Mini Snickers, Reese's cups, Kisses and Starburst candy. Note: we don't have piñatas in Brazil at all): Of course they had lots of fun, here's little brother trying to break it:
The breaking of the piñata took so long (and involved replacing the string, since it detached from it, that the younger kids went to play in the swingset:After many people had left, the closest friends remained and kids and adults played on the driveway, making chalk art and riding various toys:
(even my mom and dad tried the razor scooter, I took pictures, but won't post them).

They played until it began to get dark.It was a LOVELY day and party, in spite of the small problems (children not having time to eat, cake that went wrong).