Kaylin's Birthday Party

It's August and I've been such a blog slacker that I never wrote about Kaylin's birthday party!  Kaylin's group of friends at day camp call themselves the Gooseberries.  She wanted a party with the Gooseberries and we discussed all kinds of options such as go karts at Kartville or painting ceramics at Fired Up.  I'm normally willing to shell out extra money to NOT have to host guests at my house, but these ideas were becoming incredibly expensive and the party length was nowhere near as long as Kaylin wanted.  I wasn't too thrilled with the thought of both an expensive activity and time at home.  We studied our options over and over and finally came up with the idea of having a "messy" theme party.

I will admit that the messy theme started out as a joke.  We were discussing different things the girls could do at our house and Kaylin said that Dad would freak over the mess.  I laughed and said that we might as well just go ahead and make the theme of the party "messy" and Dad would have to deal.  We then started coming up with all kinds of messy games to drive Daddy crazy and the joke started to sound really fun.  We moved our ideas from centered around Gene's chair and TV to outside and the perfect party was born.

Kaylin wanted a long party, but not a sleepover.  That seemed like a good tradeoff to me, but how do you keep 6 girls entertained for 5 hours?  Lots and lots of messy activities.  We had squirt guns, water balloons, sidewalk chalk, cans of shaving cream, bubbles, markers and a white plastic table cloth, pudding, whipped cream and 4 pounds of cooked spaghetti for the spaghetti fight.  I'm usually very against wasting food like that, but a spaghetti fight sounded too fun.  For dinner, we decided to roast hot dogs and marshmallows over our portable fire pit.  I was pretty surprised to find that out of all the messy activities, the gooey marshmallows were by far the worst.  Kaylin originally wanted to have a flour fight, but I was having terrible visions of furious moms cursing me for their daughters' heads full of flour-pasty hair.  I had to nix the flour fight.

We moved the kitchen table and chairs to the back patio and while Gene thought I was nuts, that was probably the best decision of the party.  The girls showed up and I was shocked at how long they sat at that table, talking and drawing with markers on the white plastic table cloth.  While they were all together and relatively quiet, I told them I didn't care how much of a mess they made, but there was one rule- Keep the spaghetti in the front yard so the dogs can't eat it!  I can only imagine how sick our two stupid dogs would be from eating 4 pounds of spaghetti!  They would probably die.

Speaking of dogs, Gage absolutely loved the party.  He loved the action and attention and allowed the girls to spray him in the face with the hose and decorate him with wrapping paper and bows.  Gage wanted to be where the girls were and had a blast.  Scout and the cats kept an eye on the party, but tried to stay out of the action.

Once the messy activities started, the rest of the party was nonstop crazy.  The spaghetti fight lasted all of about 2 minutes.  It was worth it, though.  The girls then tore around the front yard with water guns and a slip and slide and plenty of shaving cream.  Gene left and went to Walmart, so I was able to get the majority of the spaghetti mess cleaned up before he got home.  I used a rake and scoop shovel and cleaned it up zoo keeper style.  After a while the girls were all STARVING, so we let them roast hot dogs over the fire.  I was a little nervous about 6 crazy girls, 1 crazy boy and FIRE, but they were all great about it.  We had S'mores for dessert and I'm sure everyone ate plenty of marshmallows because marshmallow residue was all over EVERYTHING. 

Before we knew it, the party was over and everyone was heading home.  I think everyone had a great time.  I was even glad to have hosted.  We spent about an hour cleaning up and moving the table and chairs back inside.  The spaghetti left in the yard sort of dissipated over the next week or so and the rain took care of the rest of the mess.  It turned out to be a perfect party for Messy Kaylin's 13th birthday.