Ball birthday party

When you are the mother of three boys sometimes you have to go with the obvious choice for a birthday party theme and just make it about balls.  It’s something we have lot of in our house, and it also happens to be Leo’s favorite thing to play with.  Fortunately, he prefers the plastic ones, so his party was kept at a G-rated level.

And now…the details:

I kept decorations pretty simple because, like I mentioned earlier, I am the mother of three boys.  I covered the tables and counters in white paper to make the orange and blue colors pop, and I sewed yards and yards of paper circle garlands.

I love them so much I think I will keep them for New Year’s decorations!

For an activity guests got to decorate their own party hats–I made a template for them to trace then set out punches, fluffy balls, ribbons, tissue paper—anything I could find in our craft drawers.

Of course, not everyone wanted to make a party hat, per se…

The cake was so fun to make—I dropped a bunch of uncoated cake balls into the batter so it was polka dotted on the inside, then decorated the outside with Sixlets, gumballs and a mini ball garland.

Here Leo is licking the piece he chose especially for McStreamy to have.

The spread: Swedish meatballs, cheese balls, melon balls, parmesan cheese balls, cherry tomato/mozzarella balls…you get the picture.

For favors I ordered some clear cupcake boxes, made a bunch of blue and orange cake balls, then decorated with ribbon and a tag.

For entertainment we borrowed McStreamy’s homemade “bubble ball,” which is, in their words, a “white trash bouncy house.”  (Of course, they’re going to have to come up with a new moniker now that it’s been to our house.)  It’s basically some heavy-duty plastic taped to a fan, filled with 400 plastic balls, and it was, quite literally, a big hit.

So that was the party version of Leo’s big day.  If I find a longer moment this week I will give you the gooey version of how Little Leo is no longer a sweet, sleepy baby but a silly, chatty, jumpy, wiggly, independent, bona fide boy.

See what I mean?