Rocket Party Success!

Today is Ben's 7th birthday. By coincidence, Jillian and Ben didn't have school for the past three days because of parent-teacher conferences. So I decided to have Ben's birthday party today, on his actual birthday. That doesn't happen very often!

I've spent the past two days getting things together for the games, activities, and craft. We bought a stomp rocket and a vinegar/baking soda rocket launcher for the party. I've learned from past experience to test out the activities I plan for the kids before the actual party. The stomp rocket was a blast (literally!), but we couldn't get the rocket launcher to go higher than 3 feet, so we decided to scrap that idea. We probably could have gotten it to work if we had played with it more, but we ran out of time and it used a whole cup of vinegar each time we tried it. That just seemed so wasteful! I know, vinegar is inexpensive, but still! We made the rocket pinata yesterday, and this morning I created this:

One of the kids at the party asked if it was a vacuum cleaner. Umm...no.

This morning it started raining...HARD...and I scrambled to come up with some more indoor games since it was looking like stomp rockets would be rained out, but fortunately right before party time, the rain stopped! Whew! Prayers work!

When all 8 kids arrived (Ben had a list of about 20 kids that he wanted to invite...it was very hard for him to narrow it down to just 8), we made rockets out of toilet paper tubes, tin foil, construction paper, stickers, and lots of glitter glue.

Once again, I forgot to take a picture of the finished products. They turned out so cute, too! We played a few indoor games: "rocket balloon" which didn't capture their attention for very long, and "snatch it", which was a little better. But they were getting restless, so we went outside to play with the stomp rocket. I expected the kids to all run around and try to catch the rockets, but they practiced their good first grade skills and waited nicely in line for their turn!

Next up was the pinata! It turned out to be just perfect, not too flimsy that it fell apart on the first hit (although we did end up taping the lid onto the bottom, which helped it to keep from bursting open on the first hit), and not too sturdy so that the kids could actually break it open without having to bring in the big guns!



Then back inside for cake,

and presents!This is the aftermath of present opening. Look at Ben's smile, a sure sign of a successful party. Happy Birthday, Ben!