Army Party!

Zac and Dan ready to go.

As I mentioned in my last post, this weekend we had an "army party" for Danny and one of his school friends who are both turning 5. I have to say, it was a whole lot less painful than I had anticipated and the kids seemed to have loads of fun, so although the theme rankled with me a little bit I'm now very happy that we didn't try to be politically correct! We were lucky in that it was warm and dry but not quite as scorching as it has been over the past few weeks, so we could be outside for most of the time.

Here are a few pics to show the activities that we did:

Assault course

Throwing parachute men onto a target

Nerf gun shooting range

Water pistol battle

Water bomb throwing

We also had a cool-down break with ice pops and then a calm pass-the-parcel session in the hall so things didn't go too nuts. The water pistols and water bombs were genius because they kept the kids occupied (and cool) for ages with very little effort needed from the grown-ups- apart from George's daddy who gamely volunteered to be the water bomb target!

 I'd made a "tank" cake for Danny. It was someone's clever design I'd found by looking at google images, with caterpillar tracks made out of mini chocolate fingers and jaffa cakes, and lots of camouflage-coloured icing. It did look like it had been in the wars a bit- my icing skills are not that hot, but Danny seemed to approve and since I've discovered Mary Berry's sponge recipe the cake itself actually tasted a lot nicer than my previous efforts (Sorry Mary, not sure you'd approve of your Victoria Sponge being turned into a tank!)

Fuffing out the 5

So, despite my reservations about big parties for kids, I actually really enjoyed this one. They were all active and happy, it didn't cost the earth because we organised it ourselves and borrowed stuff wherever possible, and apart from filling millions of water bombs and tying fiddly parachutes it really didn't take an awful lot of preparation either.

That said, seeing my boys in camouflage made me hope beyond hope they don't think the army would be a good career. I don't think I could bear to send them off as the real thing!

A cheerful bucketful of ammo!