Velocity Island Park Birthday Party

Hi friends!  Happy summer!  Summer is very busy for us!  Along with all the regular summer hustle and bustle, we also have 3 birthdays in our family of 5!  One of the things I've started doing to save my sanity is having the birthday parties outside our home.

I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Velocity Island Park for my son's birthday party and it was a blast!  We hadn't heard of Velocity Island Park before this and I'm so glad we got a chance to check it out.  Now, I can share with you!  (All photos by Fridge Photos.  Thank you Fred and Damian, you're a dream to work with!)

Velocity Island Park located in Woodland is a different kind of water park.  It doesn't have your usual slides or lazy river.  The have different areas where you can do different activities.  There is a cable park where you can wake board.  There is also a restaurant, volleyball courts, beach oasis, cabanas, and more.  We focused on the Aqua Park for our party.

The Aqua Park has a sturdy inflatable play structure over water.  There are slides, swings, jumping pillows, spinning wheels, balance beams and more.  Kids and adults are provided life jackets before getting onto the structure.  Life guards are there for safety, interacting with the kids, and to help them on the structure.

The birthday party includes two 50 minute sessions on the aqua park with a 10 minute break in between.  During that time, we opted to have a light snack for the kids and some water.  We ordered a fruit plate from their Black Pearl restaurant.  It was a great refreshing snack for the kids and they gobbled it up.  The break is also a great time to reapply some sunscreen.

All of the kids had a BLAST on equipment!  A few parents went out to try it and they had a great time too!  It was so fun to see them all out there swinging, playing tag, climbing, going on monkey bars, and having a great time.  Many of the kids said that they wanted to have their birthdays at Velocity Island too.  Even the kids who were apprehensive at first found their own niche within the structure.

After our two sessions on the aqua park, we had lunch in the shaded private cabana.  Three pizzas and three pitchers of drinks were included in the party package.  We opted to order two more pizzas.  The pizza was a big hit!  It is brick oven pizza.  We opted to get pepperoni, cheese, and Hawaiian pizza.  The kids loved the pizza especially after working up an appetite on the equipment.  The park provided the plates, napkins, cups, and even a Sharpie to write names on the cups which was nice so I didn't have to worry about it.

Velocity Island Park offered to store a cake for us but my son wanted cookies instead so we kept them out at the our private cabana.  The party host brought us waters and our sodas during lunch.  It was nice not to have to walk back and forth to the restaurant to get things.  It was also really nice that I didn't have to clean my house before or after a party since we had it at the park.

Overall, we had an AMAZING experience at Velocity Island Park and my kids cannot wait to go back!  We thought Woodland would be far away but it only took us 30 minutes to get there from our house.  I also thought that party guests would not want to drive out there but it was not an issue for us at all.  It's well worth the short drive!  If you are looking for a fun and active party for a summer birthday, I would highly recommend Velocity Island Park!  The kids are still talking about it!



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Pirate Party Pictures

Ok, last month we had a birthday party for the boys. We combined their birthdays into one party since their birthdays are only 5 days apart. They like the same things and they have the same friends so this is just easier for everyone involved. Here I'm just highlighting a few of the DIY things we did for the party. I'll probably post more pictures on Facebook.

Let's start with the invites again. Made in Photoshop by Dustin, photo by me.

The BIG hit of the party, the watermelon pirate ship. Dustin carved it and made the wooden things, I just made the sails with stamps from Unity's Pirate Madness.

Here's the food. I had little pirates holding up signs of what kind of food we had. The food card things are stamped with The Cat's Pajamas Arrgh! Piratey set. Here you'll see the "octopus" dip and the deviled "eyeballs."

We had a game where the kids searched for treasure, whoever found the special marked ones were the winners. The little markers are made with my Cat's Pajamas stamps again.

Here's the dress up station. We didn't really make it, just set it up.

Here's the treasure map. I distressed the paper and Dustin drew the map using landmarks from our yard.

Here are the cupcake picks I made. I colored each one with Copics and highlighted with gel pen. The images are from The Cat's Pajamas.

Here's a further away shot of the dessert table.

And here are the loot bags made with a Unity image.

Have a great day everyone!

It's a MARIO Party!

Okay friends, I'm here late Saturday night to share the projects that we made for Brady and Parker's joint birthday party tomorrow. Brady has been SUPER interested in Super Mario lately. I don't know how it came about though Dustin is a huge Mario fan so that could be it. (WARNING: VERY LONG POST!)

When we decided to have a Mario party, I figured that I would have to special order a bunch of stuff off of the internet. However, we decided to try to save some money and do things ourselves. So, I Googled Mario birthday parties and found the BEST BLOG EVER!! It's called Cool Party Blog and this gal has the BEST ideas for do it yourself parties that are just AMAZING!! I would LOVE to go to one of her parties, but this lady knows how to party! She HAS to be the cool mom from class where the kids look forward to her parties all year!

First up, I made her Yoshi Loot Bags. Though the directions aren't too hard, these bags were a horrible pain to make! I started WAY too late and had to go to a bunch of different stores to try to find this lime green party bag to be the base. Well, the party store was out both times I checked. No other stores had this color in the right size so I had to settle for these bags from Michael's that are too small for the template. So, Dustin had to reduce the template to 93% after tons to playing with it and it worked. Inside, we put a bunch of fun little party favors from the Dollar Tree.

Next up, I made Cool Party Blog's Mario and Luigi party hats for all the kids. Now, she was able to find reversible red and green poster board and make her hats reversible. I was not. Funny story, I DID find reversible red and BLUE poster board and in a moment of insanity, I thought "PERFECT! Red for Mario, blue for Luigi!" Well, on the way home, I remembered that Luigi wears GREEN! Whoops!

Then I later decided that the red poster board wasn't quite RED enough, so I used card stock instead. MISTAKE! I used Gina K pure luxury card stock. That's how much I love my kids, I'm willing to sacrifice my super nice card stock for them. Well, the issue is that this amazing card stock is TOO thick and not pliable enough for hats. So, if you want to make these, FIND the poster board in the right shade of red. (NOTE: They do not have the right shade of red at Target, Walmart, or Joann!) ;) To the left, is the adorable Parker modeling the Mario hat.

Here's Brady modeling the Luigi hats. Doesn't he look happy and so grateful I spent all that time making these hats for him and his friends? ;) These were made out of the nice poster board I found at Michael's and they were SO much easier to score and fold. Especially since you need to score a curve into the hats so that they can mold around a person's head. These are made with elastic bands on the back. They kind of look like visors. They fit everyone, even my GIANT noggin!

Ok, the next project evolved over time. Originally, Dustin was thinking that we should have question mark boxes for party favors. However, I decided (for some crazy reason) that I didn't want to print, cut, score and assemble 12 cubes all by myself. Then, we thought about just making them and setting them around the room as decorations. THEN I got a lightbulb moment!

Have you ever played Super Mario? Well, Mario finds these question mark boxes and he gets all sorts of fun things out of them like one up mushrooms, coins, fire flowers, etc... So, my thought was TREATS should come out of the box! A pinata!! I can't take credit for any of the making of this pinata other than the idea. Dustin made it for the boys.

Dustin took the box our new rice cooker came in and turned it inside out. He painted it yellow and printed out question marks. He glued them to the box. Then he cut out a "trap door" into the bottom of the box. One of the ribbons is tied to the trap door. The other ribbons are just tucked into the box. One lucky child will pull the trap door ribbon and all the candy will come pouring out...we hope! Here's Dustin wearing his Official Nintendo Mario hat and modeling the box.

So, the party is tomorrow at lunch time. I hope it goes well. Have a great Sunday everyone!

I Won!

Holy moly! I won a Unity Anniversary challenge for this cake I made! I think this might be the first thing I've ever won that wasn't a random drawing! YAY!

The voting for the grand prize is next week and I'll be sure to post the link here. Hopefully, you will vote for my cake! I spent a lot of time on it but it really doesn't matter since Brady loves it! He points to it and he makes animal noises. That's really all I need. :) But it's nice to be noticed for my work.

My Labor of Love

Last Wednesday, Maren posted a challenge on the Unity forum to be inspired by pictures of cake she found on Flickr.  I was inspired by the whole "theme"of bright, fun cakes.  And then I noticed that you could make a 3D project for the challenge and my brain went into overdrive.  

I found a template (on SCS) for making little pieces of cake from paper.  There are 33 pieces in this cake.  Each piece will go to one of Brady's 2nd birthday party guests.  (I HAD to rationalize spending ALL this time and supplies making a 3 layer cake somehow.)  So, instead of making some frilly girlie cake, I decided to make a jungle cake for my lion and monkey loving son.    

This cake features the animals from Unity's Wild and Crazy Bunch.  The "leaves" are actually trees from Unity's Giggle Grove and Unity's Tiny Trinity.  I cut out each animal in two different colors.  The leaves are also done in two different colors.  I added Prima flowers with dew drop center.  The cake is held together by some green polka dot ribbon that I got at Michael's.  The cake topper is a photo cube highlighting adorableness from Brady's 2nd  year of life.  I used some stickers to write out the birthday greeting for him.  And that's it.  :)  It took about 16 hours after all the IMMENSE amount of cutting.

Wish me luck!  The winner of the contest will be announced on Wednesday and then later people will vote on a grand prize winner.  :)

Here are some more pictures: