Yesterday we celebrated Cameron's 7th birthday (March 31st) and Landon's 4th birthday (April 11th) with a combined birthday party to the theme of the Plants vs. Zombies computer game. For those who may not be yet familiar with this highly addictive tower defense type game, it's a kid/family friendly game with cartoony graphics (see image above) with the basic premise that you strategically place plant-type defenders on a grid layout to guard your house from an onslaught of zombies. I dare you to try it and not love it...
Cameron and Landon each invited about 10 friends and we divided the party into 3 main parts. First, as guests were arriving throughout the first hour of the party, we played games in the backyard that were themed after the game... like "Zombie Hunt" (shooting nerf darts at zombie targets), "Walnut Bowling" (bowling a coconut "walnut" into pins), and "Dodge-bomb" (regular dodgeball but using a ball that looked like a cherry). We gave each kid either a plant or zombie sticker to denote whether they would be scoring points for the plant or zombie team. Surprisingly and much opposite of what I expected, almost all of the boys preferred the plant stickers and just one small sweet girl wanted to be a zombie.
After that we had cake and ice cream right there on our back patio. We had mint chocolate chip ice cream (something green to fit the plants theme) and the "cake" was a pan of cupcakes. Each cupcake had either a plant or zombie label and they were put on top of a laminated printout of a typical backyard level of the game.
The third and final phase to the party was the most unique and also most experimental one. We set up 9 computer stations (3 laptops, 1 PC, 1 iMac, and 4 mobile phones) inside the house where the kids could come in and take turns playing the actual Plants vs. Zombies game. While during the planning phase of the party it seemed well-suited to the theme, for some reason I hadn't given too much thought of what it was going to be like to have 20+ kids that are Landon and Cameron's ages crowding into our family room and eating area playing on the computers or phones or trying to keep busy while waiting to play. Fortunately it was a pretty good bunch of kids and nothing was trampled or damaged.
Just before and as guests were leaving Cameron and Landon opened their gifts, which was a great way to end the party. With all things considered we felt the party went really well and was probably our most satisfying in terms of time commitment, budget, scheduling, and time management. And we were especially thankful for our new fence we spent the entire previous week during spring break (both Eve and I took the whole week of work off to coincide with the kids' week off from school) installing on the west side of our backyard.
Finally here is a link to a video of us singing happy birthday to Cameron and Landon: http://youtu.be/tOCu9Rv57kg
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