And Bentley's Birthday!

I never got around to blogging about Bentley's birthday, so here goes!

He wanted a Minecraft theme for his party, which meant I had no idea what to do.  I tried looking at Pinterest, and immediately became overwhelmed and wanted to crawl into a dark place and rock in the fetal position.  This is actually pretty standard for me and Pinterest, so I quickly closed that tab and gave up completely.

A week or two later, I asked Bentley what sort of cake he wanted, and he said he wanted sugar cookies.  (He doesn't like cake.)  And that's when I had my one good idea: we would make square sugar cookies and let the kids frost them and make them Minecraft-y!  Problem solved!  I figured that was good enough for a party, but then Craig one-upped me by coming with the idea of wrapping empty boxes in colored paper a la Minecraft.  We stayed up late doing that the night before, and then in the morning VERY carefully explained to Bentley that these were not presents, they were props for the party.  He was fine with that, so we avoided any unnecessary drama there.

And then after school was the party!

Craig's idea was a huge hit.  He divided the kids into teams, and then one team would build something with the boxes and then the other team got to throw things at them to try and knock it down.  Pretty much every little boy's idea of a good time.

There she goes!

Later we let the kids decorate cookies.  I had it in my head that they could try to build with the cookies, and in addition to various Minecraft-y colors of frosting, I also had pretzel sticks and mini-marshmallows and other stuff like that to build with.  But mostly they just frosted them and ate them.  Smart kids!

And then of course it was time for presents!

One little boy surprised us by insisting he massage Bentley's feet.  Even that boy's father agreed it was pretty weird, but we've enjoyed some good laughs over it ever since!

That weekend, then, we headed to Grandma and Grandpa's house for more presents:

Love at first sight

Overall, I'd say it was a successful birthday on all counts!  The Minecraft party turned out better than I thought it would, everyone had fun, and Bentley was very happy.  Whew!

Now excuse me while I delete my Pinterest account...