So London is now six. Pretty cool. The whole kindergarten thing and whatnot, well it's just amazing.
But as we live far from our larger family groups, mine mostly resides in and around Tampa, FL and Sarah's mostly in Colorado (we're in Portland, OR) we haven't had much in the way of birthday parties—certainly nothing large or fancy, 4 or 5 kids, tops.
But with kindergarten came a friends, lot's of them, and they all live in the neighborhood, which is a very cool thing that I didn't have growing up. Anyway, we had to invite them all. There is a lot of pressure involved in this mostly because London wanted to have the party at our house. Already we had gone to parties at pools, gymnastics centers, OMSI, etc., so we had to make it as cool as that, but in our house.
I think we pulled it off OK. The theme was Star Wars, as that is all London cares about right now, so we decided to make Jedi cloaks and lightsabers for all. That is a bit of work.
Luckily I found that kids of this age are very series about hitting each other's lightsaber as opposed to going for the kill, so we really had no injuries, which might be a minor miracle.
I made the lightsabers out of
fluorescent light tube covers, which I just stumbled across at the Lowes. I trimmed them down to an appropriate size with the garden pruners (I don't have a lot of tools), duct taped the first 8 inches (black duct tape), filled the tube with various things to get color (the best choice was rolled up strips of construction paper), and placed the caps back on. They were wonderful and quite strong!
Sarah made the cloaks out of squares of thin brown or black cloth (they got to choose) that were then safety pinned in such a way as to provide the young jedis with a hood.
Anyway, great time. Lots of kids.
