Shark Party Details

Ok, so I realize that Henry's Birthday party was over a month ago but if you can believe it, only yesterday did I just finish scraping the last window that I painted with glue and poster paint to look like an aquarium with sharks swimming around.  I wanted to have his shark party at the zoo, but that would have cost 500 dollars just for the space so I made my own aquarium with the many windows in my living room complete with over a hundred balloons covering the walls to look like the water.  

This party was pretty much out of control and whenever I don't blog about something ever(like my trip out to the NW by myself for two weeks while I was in my first trimester of pregnancy=exhaustion) or very late it means that it's taken that long to recover or it's just a blur from being too tired.  Some details of the party include...a total of 45 people in attendance, a really cool shark pinata filled with 20 lbs of candy and probably weighed more than Bea, singing the jaws song, playing pin the fin on the shark, reading a book about sharks, playing shark attack with a giant shark balloon to the theme music of JAWS which really scared some of the kids.  It really makes you realize how music influences how we feel.  Some people deny it but you can't deny a two year old who has never seen JAWS freeze in absolute fear after hearing the movie theme music.  We, of course, ate a ton of really yummy food that included shark cheese crackers, shark shaped sandwiches, three types of seafood dip with crackers and a giant fruit salad.

 

 The highlight was, however, the cake, which I painstakingly made over two days time.  I tried to copy another woman's cake on this awesome website but my perfect shark head coming out of the water turned into a super scar-faced shark with a collapsed mouth. No one noticed though and the kids all loved it.  It was also pretty scary!  The bottom of the cake was the most delicious cake I've ever made though which was a whole wheat version of this dulce de leche cake.  Best cake I've ever made and possibly ever eaten.  I also made my dulce de leche from scratch using a real vanilla bean and milk(as opposed to using a can of sweetened condensed milk), and that took three hours in itself to make.  I highly recommend it.  

After the cake we watched Henry's 4th Birthday slide show which was the best yet and he still wants to watch it over and over again.  I did it to one of my favorite Coldplay songs, "Death and all of his friends," which seems like a weird song title but I didn't even know exactly what the words were until I uploaded it for the show because they're almost inaudible and most of the song is just an instrumental, and a really fantastic one at that.  Anyway, the show was great and I know those slide shows make Henry feel really special so I'm going to keep doing them as long as I can manage.  I'm getting faster at creating them anyway. 

Henry then opened all his presents which were mostly transformers and other action figures.  He really needed some age appropriate toys since everything we had was either baby oriented or just blocks and puzzles.  He really loves his transformers and he and daddy spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to transform them and they also love playing with legos together now too.    

Henry still tells everyone, especially complete strangers, about his shark party. The best part about it was that we were able to coordinate it with Gammie and Grandpa Hohl along with favorite aunt Courtney(she chases the kids for hours on end) who helped out immensely.  I couldn't have pulled it off without them unless I had woken up at 4 am to get things started that day.  Thanks to everyone who helped out and who came to the party! I hope to never do anything that crazy again.