A Five Year-Old Blast-Off

At long last, here are some photos of Brooklyn's birthday party. While she initially wanted a princess party (surprise, surprise), we persuaded her to switch over to a more original space theme. She is extremely interested in everything astronautical at the moment.

Truth to be told, we're lucky that we pulled off a party at all. The week before the birthday was pretty intense for everyone. Jason handed in his last architecture assignment only hours before the party, so he was pretty worn out when the festivities began.

Oddly enough, our party began with a story time sponsored by our local library. It turns out that the housing office double-scheduled the community room. In the end, only our group came to story time, so everything worked out fine. Thanks, Char!

We then moved on to some parachute games where we helped our astronaut leap around space.


The highlight of the party was breaking the star-shaped pinata that we made using a mylar balloon. The kids had a great time whacking the daylights out of it, although most of the hard candy had been pulverized by the time it finally broke open.



We also painted planets and attached rockets, aliens, and other sundry orbiting objects.


Meanwhile, Eli assumed his customary post as table centerpiece.

For a treat, we created cupcake-cone rockets (an original invention--I was pretty pleased with this ingenious way to avoid complicated cake decorating.)

Just add a puff of whipped cream smoke...

..and blast-off!

(Warning: these tasty treats may result in messy noses.)

Add an earth cake,..

some fanfare,..


and the result is one very happy birthday!

We love you, Brooklyn!