And Then He Turned FIVE!?

This was Cooper's first year to have a birthday party with friends

(as opposed to a simple celebration with family.)

Mom was excited to go all-out.

After much deliberation (and me talking him out of a superhero theme)

somehow Cooper came up with the idea...

he wanted a SNOWMAN party.

At first it seemed really silly, and weird.

But he was so excited, and insisted.

Wouldn't you know, then it really started growing on us!  Why not?

A snowman party it is!

With a dozen little munchkins, our hands were pretty full, so my photos are minimal.  

But here's how the whole party turned out:

Our first activity while everyone was arriving was to make sock snowmen.

These required lots of grown-up helpers (THANK YOU TO MY HELPERS!)

but were so worth it.

They are soooooooo cute!!!

Like, I have to squeal out loud every time I walk by them, cute.

Each kid got to make one, pick out the hat/scarf colors, and take them home at the end.

Next, we played "Melted Snowman" which was really "Hot Potato" 

with a small stuffed snowman guy I already owned.

I played Christmas music, pausing it now and then, and someone was out of the circle 

every time the music stopped.

(No pictures!)

Our next game was "Pin the Carrot on the Snowman"

Adorable, yes?

I free-handed that bad boy (pictured above) onto some foam board 

and tied a homemade scarf around their heads for the blindfold.

Then we removed that circle out of his center section and threw snowballs through the target.

Double whammy usage for my foam board snowman - yesss!

"Snowballs" were crumpled up white paper.

In the above picture, you can see Cooper's throw is WAY off target up there in the blinds.

I am a big fan of throw-something-at-a-target games for young kids (have you noticed?)

For some reason, it's always the biggest hit.  They wanted to keep going on this one forever.

The last game divided the kids into 2 teams, and they had to wrap one person up in toilet paper (to look like a snowman!) then add a scarf and hat to finish it off.

The first team finished won!  

 We called this one a draw.  That pesky toilet paper kept ripping... but they sure had a giggle-fest trying!

The birthday cake for this party was snowman cupcakes served with chocolate milk.

You can barely see in the picture below that I also drew snowman faces on all the cups.

 Who wants more??

So other than the craft, this whole party was seriously low budget.

We ended up having such a great time, boy or girl, old or young!