Elijah’s Third Birthday

This year we celebrated Elijah’s third Birthday, on his actual Birthday, Tuesday, August 30th. Aaron wanted to throw the party at the community center park. Our church uses this park and space a lot for outreach type events. Elijah and I use this space as a place to play in lieu of a backyard.

So, here we go on a Tuesday evening, 6PM, the second week of school. We invited several from our church who have some kind of relationship to Elijah and we invited his whole preschool class. We had a decent crowd with several kids, 4 from his class came plus one of his teachers! He hasn’t stopped talking about it.

Thomas the Train was the theme. I spent the day making over 50 cupcakes for the party (thank goodness Jess Renya Worthington was around to help). It was a Thomas the Train extravaganza!

Elijah loves party hats and insisted we have party hats for his Birthday celebration!

We had to get a little creative as to where to hang stuff

I was pleased by the diversity of our group. Of course that’s the nature of the city, but it’s easy to surround yourself with people who look just like you!

I’m pretty sure Elijah ate about 15 pieces of pizza. Every time I turned around he was eating more! Good thing we ordered 12 pizzas!

Here’s a sampling of the cupcakes I made. I was going to get really creative and make more authentic Thomas the Train cupcakes and then I realized that attempting would be completely out of control….so, I opted for Thomas the Train Cupcake rings in each cupcake.

Once again, getting creative with where we hung things, Aaron climbed up and hung the Pinata from the water fountain in the park.

It worked great! Elijah was super excited to take a big stick and hit something….only one problem.

We quickly learned that we had not put the candy in the correct location. See, up until about 2 hours before the party, we thought the pinata already had candy in it. Aaron had to quickly run to Target, get some candy and stuffed it in the only place he saw. Apparently that was the wrong place. So….

Aaron had to offer some pretty big help, by basically pouring the candy out for all the kids.

Another situation that I just wasn’t prepared for, which after doing urban ministry in Boston for 5 years, I totally should have been prepared for, was all the unsupervised kids who hang out at the community center after school crashing attending our party. Again, I was thankful I made so many cupcakes and had ordered 12 pizzas, every last crumb was gone. Several children in the picture above are kids who basically invited themselves to the party. Gotta hand it to them, at least they’re assertive!

While this picture depicts me have a fun, carefree time at the party, it was a bit overwhelming. Especially managing all the neighborhood kids that I didn’t expect.

However, all in all everyone had a great time! I couldn’t believe all the positive responses I received.

More than anything, Elijah had a BLAST and hasn’t stopped talking about his Birthday party. He loved every minute of it!

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