Dominique's birthday extravaganza!

Dominique had her birthday party a week after the actual day and just before we left for Saskatoon.  We made tie-die like bandanas, home made pizza and played a bunch of games.

I was thankful that we were able to find some friends who were around for the summer.  The benefit of a summer birthday is that the weather was gorgeous, but the downfall is that friends may not be in town or available.

We did races.

Penny on the noodle and had to be dropped in a pool of water.

The games were movie themed.

most of them were relays.  Here they had to get the penny out with a partner only using their feet.

In this one each team member had to race to get lego pieces to build a castle, once the pieces were attached, then next player got to go run.  I let them pick 8, 6, 4 then 2 pieces going from the oldest to youngest kids.  They really got into this one.  I then asked them to describe their castle and tell me what the best features were.

There were 2 teams.  The castles were great and the frog prince ended up deciding that he would use one castle as his weekly residence and the other one as his weekend get away.

There was also a scavenger hunt.  The movie characters were giving the clues.  Princess Fiona from Shrek was in the compost box and Rapunzel in the tree fort.  Stitch who got hit by a truck in the movie was on the tire swing.  They had to work as a team to get it down.  It took several tries to get a system that worked.

Fiorella was the only one tall enough, but the other's had to get the swing close enough for her to grab the clue.  Ivan was banned at this point for giving away all the clues he already knew.

Snowwhite on the shovel, Arial on the pool...  I love scavenger hunts and the kids do too.  We should really get into geocatching-  isn't that a scavenger hunt for adults?

She wanted her cake designed with a rose, so I decided to make a rose.  It was messy, but she liked it enough.

In these pics, they had to ask yes and no questions to find out who they were.

I'm always amazed at how much planning activities take and how little time it takes them to do them!  Both with Camp Cousins and the party- tons of prep., organizing and thinking up things, also clean up and they just zip through it all.  But when she said "thank you mom" and gave me a big hug and said she loved me- it made it all worth it!