On Thursday our little Snuggles turned 5 years old! He still loves his Woody and Buzz toys, and they are the ones that will always stick out in my mind when I think of his childhood, but this past year he has really been enjoying race cars (especially the “Cars” and “Cars 2” themed race cars), so he asked if he could please have a “Race Car Birthday.” I went back and forth on whether I wanted to go with a “Cars/Lightning McQueen” theme, or just stick with a “Classic” racing theme, but after looking though all the fun ideas online I couldn’t resist going with the movie theme.
I had all sorts of ideas that I wanted to try, but since his birthday fell right after Family Camp, and in the middle of Golf Camp, I had to keep it somewhat simple. I decided to skip all the extra games and activities and just stick with making some fun foods for the party and purchasing a pinata. It was perfect! A few friends joined us, Snuggle’s best friend along with three of his brothers (who came home with my kids from golf camp to spend the night) and my dear friend Janet and her two children (who just arrived home from Virginia for the summer). We all enjoyed the company and Hubby even set up a tent in the back yard so the boys could “camp.” Nevertheless, Friday morning was just a little crazy trying to get all the kids to the golf course by 8:30 for their last day of camp and “golf tournament!”
Some of the boys mentioned that it was really sad that they were going to hit poor Lightning McQueen with a bat, so I told them that they were just going to give him a “crash test!” lol Lightning didn’t pass the test, but the kids all loved all the goodies he had hidden inside. 🙂
I already posted a couple pictures of the cake in this post. If I had it to do over, I would probably do a couple things differently. Since I used two box mixes, I made the 6″ cakes on top with a gluten free cake mix which ended up being much heavier than the 9″ triple chocolate cake on the bottom. I decorated the cake the night before, so by the time we were ready for cake the top had started sinking/tipping into the bottom cake. Only I noticed, the kids didn’t care one bit! 🙂
Despite the excitement with “camping” outback, the birthday boy and his 5year old friend ended up sleeping inside, and even the big kids were nervous about sleeping “by themselves in the woods.” (Apparently our home is considered in the woods/mountains to our friends that live in town!) All the wind rustling through the leaves on the trees didn’t help, so Hubby grabbed his sleeping bag and slept in the tent too.
