Pokemon Party

I've been planning and preparing for Joseph's birthday party this past week. I threw him a Pokemon Party. Even though I always 'knew' my kids wouldn't be into Pokemon. I swore they wouldn't watch it, because I thought it was obnoxious; too many battle noises & too many weird japanese animated facial expressions. But then I took a chill pill and realized it's not a big deal. Kids love it because of all the different pokemon creatures with cool names and cool powers and all the information they have to memorize, and boy, do they memorize it! it's amazing all the stats and HPs and damage levels, pokemon types, powers, names of each one and what they evolve into. It's a headache to me! But I allow my boys to watch it (just not everyday or I go crazy) and play with their pokemon cards, but I dont play with them. I tried once and it's a foreign language. I couldn't understand it and frankly didnt want to take the time that it takes to learn! But the party was adorable. You know me, I cant just do simple. I cant do boring! So it was really cute. I get that from mom – going just a little bit overboard on the fun factor. Mom made everything fun. Each holiday and birthday, (which is like every couple of weeks throughout the year!) was always decorated and had all kinds of craziness. But I am trying to cut back, to be a fun mom, yes, but only do what I can handle. I’ve learned to let go if something’s not working out and becoming a hassle whereas I used to push it to the limit and stubbornly try to make it work, putting way too much time into a creative idea gone wild than anyone ever should. Ah, Sigh. So for this party, I didn’t go Crazy, but I did: make the invitations look like Pokeballs (do you know what those are?) My kitchen table was made to look like one also, that’s where they put their gifts. Oh and the cake was a pokeball too; looked cool. I made Starmie Sandwiches and Pokemon Punch for the party food (Starmie is a pokemon shaped like a star - I made grilled cheese sandwiches and used a star cookie cutter) and for pokemon punch we just put rainbow sherbert in the Sprite. After the boys ate the food (13 of them at 3 small tables set up in the backyard!) we played Pokemon Bingo. They loved it. I printed out their bingo cards (with pokemon characters on each square) that I found online. We used pennies & nickles for markers and the winner got to keep all the coins. After Bingo we rushed them through decorating their cupcakes with yellow frosting & candies to look like Pikachu, oh, after they sang Happy Birthday and Joseph blew out the #6 candle on his pokeball cake. Then we did presents. The time went by so quickly that we didn't have time to play the second game I had prepared which was going to be a "catch 'em all, eat 'em all" candy hunt and pokemon trivia. Oh well. Leftover candy for me. The boys all had a great time, they really enjoyed just playing. I let them play for the first 1/2 hour; half of them in joseph's room, half of them surrounding the computer in the office looking at pokemon stuff. That's also why we ran out of time so fast! Joseph was having a blast with that many boys over to play, Joshua too. They all wanted to stay when their moms came to pick them up, so i'm glad they liked it. The cutest thing was the pikachu hats I made for them to wear, and the little red circles I fingerpainted on their cheeks.