If you know Sam very well, you know that his favorite thing of all time is his birthday. He thinks about it, dreams about it, and talks about it for about 364 days before the big day finally comes! He has been scheming about his birthday for months and months, trying to come up with the perfect theme for his cake and party. These are some of the theme ideas he came up with:
Cheese party
Mummy party
Beaver party
Thanksgiving party
Skunk party
Balloon party
Clipboard party
Hair party
Show party
Wii party
Snack party
Lego party
Pirate party
Bad guy party
Alien party
Bug party
Food fight party
After discussing in detail with Henry and Ellis, however, Sam realized that the party theme may heavily influence the type of gifts people might bring. This made it easy to decide. If he wanted people to bring him Knight & Castle Legos, he should have a KNIGHT PARTY.
Since nothing is more fun than getting ready for a birthday party, Sam chose to spend three hours of his birthday helping/supervising me with the cake. Yes, there were specifications to be met. During lulls between frosting tasting and sprinkle rolling, he checked the iPad to see which "guy" we were listening to at the moment (he requested the Bach station on Pandora and was totally intrigued by which musician came up next).
Like I said, specifications. Sam made pretty much every decision about this cake - starting with the four Pinterest pictures we fused together and ending with chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate! This might be the most time I have ever spent on a birthday cake...but he was there with me for every detail, and I couldn't go with less-than-perfect for my knight's castle cake!
We got to take a few breaks during the day to do other important birthday things.
We had presents and cupcakes with the brothers on the night of Sam's birthday. His party was the next day.
Okay, so the castle cake totally leaned backwards. But who cares, right?
I prepared this sword in the stone the night before . . . totally underestimating the amount of corn starch (and drying time) I would need for the air dry clay. Meh, Sam didn't care!
Table decorations, picked out by Sam exactly 6 weeks prior to the big day
All of the lucky knights and princesses eating their evening meal. We regretted that we don't have room in our dining room for a giant round table!
Um, they pulled out the sword and broke the stone on the first try.
But they all had fun pretending to keep trying to get the sword out while Ben held it together!
Andrew was pretty happy about it.
The kids decorated their own shields. They also had sword training and catapult practice with Ben. It was really pretty low key, since I was still recovering from the PTA event. All of it went according to Sam's plans though, and that made him happy.
And I'm going to post all four of these pictures of my boy, because they all capture different aspects of his adorable personality.
My baby is four years old. I can't believe it! I love him so much.
