A Birthday fit for a Jedi

Several months ago, Clay started to plan his seventh birthday party. He told me that it had to be a Star Wars party. He even made a list of what food he wanted to be served. For weeks, I got little reminders from Clay to make sure I wouldn't forget the things he had planned.

Here is the invite that we sent out.

I downloaded and used a free font from this website.  We already had the Obi Wan costume on hand from a few Halloweens ago.  Clay's friends were really excited about the party when they got their invites.  Although, I think a few of them were concerned about the last paragraph!

Mike had been out of town for days leading up to the party.  He got home from Oklahoma the day before, went to work until 11:30, and then together we stayed up until 3:00 getting things ready for the party.  I spent a lot of my time working on the Jedi robes that I had made for each of the kids.

 

As the kids arrived, we had them make up their new Jedi name. 

Clay and I printed out a list of Jedi sounding parts of names (like walker, light, fett, obi, solo, kin, wan, ana...) and cut them into strips. 

We gave each of the kids a name tag and told them to:

1) write the first 3 letters of their first name

2) draw a strip out of the cup and write it down as the ending of their first name

3) write the first 3 letters of their last name

4) draw another slip and do the same thing as the first name  

The next step was for the kids to make their own light sabers.  To make the light sabers, I took a dowel stick (found in the craft section at Walmart) and hot glued inside of some pipe insulation (found at Home Depot in the plumbing section).  This made the foam insulation a lot stronger and hurt more during a fight.  Then, I had mike cut some pieces of pvc pipe for the handles of the light sabers.  The pipe insulation/dowel fit really snug in the pvc pipe. All of this was done before the party.  I bought blue, purple, red and green duct tape (found at Hobby Lobby) for the kids to wrap around the foam.  The rebel jedis picked red.  Then they wrapped the handle with black electrical tape.

Mike made a great Jedi trainer.  He came up with a few exercises for the kids to do to help master their Jedi skills. 

Mike took a bag of balls that came from a ball pit and had the kids block them with their light sabers.  This was by far the favorite of all the kids.  They could've spent all day doing that exercise.  Another exercise was to take a balloon and try to balance it on their light sabers.  We were all impressed with "P" and his balancing skills, until we realized he taped his balloon to the saber! 

Near the end of training, they got a surprise visit from Darth Vader.  

They were shocked.

My favorite part was when all of the kids chased Vader all the way to his Civic.

After all that training, it was time for a break.  So they ate Wookie Cookies (no-bakes), Yoda Soda (Sprite with lime sherbet), and birthday cake.

The Yoda Soda was a huge hit. 

Here's all of the group minus "J" who broke his arm the day before during a bike accident (which happened to be in front of my house, yikes).  He was taking a break on the couch at the time. :)