Bits~n~pieces: Football Birthday

On Saturday we had the boys' birthday party. All year they have been saying they wanted a football party--I really meant it when I say they are totally obsessed! Even my sports-crazed husband says he thinks it's remarkable how into it they are at such a young age. We were driving home from my parent's house last night and they asked if there were any football games on the radio. Seriously! It's hard enough for me to watch a game, and here they were asking to listen to one! Crazy boys.

Anyway. Back to the party. I started out by sending out these invitations:

When I asked them what they wanted to do at their party, they said they wanted to go to the park and play football with their friends. Easy enough! But not with last week's snow storms and the freezing temperatures. So I had to get creative.

We started out by eating food that you eat at a football game, or as the boys said, "Dome food", so-called after the big dome NAU plays in. We had hot dogs, popcorn, pretzels, nachos and soda--all very healthy. It was a huge hit!

The boys said they wanted to buy football jerseys for all the kids at their party, but after we explained how expensive that would be, we opted for making our own t-shirts. They were really easy and turned out pretty cute--football players for the boys and cheerleaders for the girls. It was a packet I got at Wal-Mart where you can print right off the computer onto these iron-on papers. Then the kids colored them with markers and crayons, you remove the backing, and iron on to a shirt. The instructions say you can wash them--we'll soon find out!

Next we played some games:
**Musical footballs: I cut a bunch of footballs out of foam sheets and hid them around the room. After a game of "find a football", we then played a variation of musical chairs with them.
**Hot football: Hot potato only with a football. I had no idea they would like this so much!
**Dizzy Kicker: Jason was the target. I would spin a kid around until he/she was dizzy, then they had to try to kick a balloon and try to hit Jason. The kids thought this was hilarious!

All the games were a big hit. Our house was sooo loud! But it was a lot of fun. And with the exception of one little boy who kept trying to cheat, all the kids got along really well. The winners of the games received a "Superbowl" trophy with gum inside.

Then on to cake and ice cream. I miscalculated and the cake only went up to the 40 yard line. Even I know that there should be 50. The boys were so excited about the football action figures that they didn't even notice. If they had, however, we had a backup plan--when Jason was in High School, he played 8-man football on an 80 yard field. So if they had noticed, we would have told them that we did it on purpose. The scale of the players is way off, but oh well. They didn't care.

Instead of goody bags, Jason had the idea to put all the loot in Gatorade bottles. What a creative husband I have! I found Strawberry Shortcake cantines for the girls. The kids seemed to really like them. Especially when they found out there was candy inside. We also included gum in plastic football containers, gold medals, candy watches etc.

I bought these little foam footballs and it was my plan to have each of the kids sign the ball, but I totally forgot! So I just wrote their names on them so they can remember everyone who came to their party.