JASON BLOGGING:

Lucia usually blogs our kids’ sessions (and everything else on the blog) but last year she was so busy editing that she never got around to sharing the pictures of our own kids.  We didn’t want that to happen again this year so I am blogging them instead!

Our son celebrated his birthday this year with a Skylanders party (though of course by now he is onto Minecraft instead).  Lucia is an amazing mom and if you know anything about the game you’ll see what an awesome job she did with all of the details!  They don’t sell much for Skylanders party supplies so she made most of it herself.  If you don’t know much about playing Skylanders, the party might not seem to make much sense but still had fun games and yummy food!  All the party guests were Portal Masters and had to battle to save the Skylands!  In the game, there are 8 elements, each with their own symbol and color.  Everyone had a Portal Master book where they had to complete a task to earn a sticker for each element.  When they collected all 8 stickers, they had restored the elements to the Core of Light and saved the Skylands.

For the element of Life, the task was to enjoy the yummy themed food Lucia put out.  All the snacks and candy were related to the game and had a card showing the character it was based on.  She made yummy “tree bark” for Tree Rex, I helped with some popcorn balls for Sonic Boom’s Clouds, we had Whirlwind’s Rainbows (colored twizzlers), Eruptor’s Fire Balls, Slam Bam’s Ice Rocks (blue rock candy), Sunburn’s Dragon Wings (our son’s favorite food is wings so we had some delivered), and Hot Head’s Watermelon (a special trick Hot Head does in the game).

The other tasks to complete were mini games, each labeled with the task to complete and a picture of one of the characters from that element.  For fire, there was Eruptor’s Lava Lob where the kids threw lava balls into the cauldron of fire.

Lucia and I made candy bones (white chocolate coated pretzels with mini marshmallows on either end) for the undead task.  They had to throw Chop Chop’s bones back to him (into the cup) and then they could eat the bones.

Kids either loved or hated the magic task.  Wrecking Ball eats Chompies, which are green blob looking things, so we had a Chompie Chomp.  They had to eat 3 Chompies (marshmallows with green food coloring and green sprinkles) in 15 seconds.

Crusher’s Rock Smash for the earth element was the most popular task.  I froze laminated pictures of Skylander characters in a bowl of water with food coloring that made it look either brown or gray (we made a few).  The kids then used tools to smash the rocks and retrieve the characters.

Jet Vac’s Vacuum and Blast was the air task.  We gave each kid a straw to move a picture of Jet Vac from one bowl to another (sucking in to “vacuum” and blowing out to “blast”.)  Tech was Trigger Happy’s Golden Target Practice where we painted Nerf guns gold and had them shoot water bottles covered in gold foil.  Finally, to earn the water element sticker the kids played Thumpback’s Floating Match-Up.  We wanted to find little fish or whales to play this game but all we could find were jet skis to float in water.  Each jet ski held either a picture of a water element character or their name.  The kids had to pick up a boat and see what was inside, then pick up another and try to get a match (the name for the character, or the character for the name).

Our son said it was his best birthday and you can’t beat that!

For his annual birthday session, we stayed near home and kept things casual this year.  Here are a few favorites from his session:

It is always fun going out with each kid and spending some time alone with them capturing their unique personalities.