We had the Captain’s 7th birthday party on Saturday and I learned two very important things.

First, nine boys at a party is too many.

Second, our kid is (reassuringly) pretty far down on the spectrum of acting goofy. Seriously, you want to talk about butts and boogers, six-year-old boys are THERE FOR YOU.

Despite that, it all went very well, The Captain had a very, very good time, no major fights broke out, and all the boys went home happy, so that was good. Sir Monkeypants was a champ, and FameThrowa and Mr. Chatty came and without them we literally would not have survived. WE OWE THEM.

Actual conversation between me and FameThrowa last weekend:

FameThrowa: Do you want me to come over to help with the party?

Me: Oh, no, I’m sure we’ll be fine.

FameThrowa: Really? Because it’s nine boys plus the girls, that sounds crazy.

Me: It’s only three hours, I’m sure we can handle it.

FameThrowa: Think about this. Little Miss Sunshine is two. She requires constant supervision herself. If Sir Monkeypants takes her, that leaves you with TEN CHILDREN. So how about I come over?

Me: YOU ARE THE MOST WONDERFUL SISTER EVER.

I really hate it when I have to ask FameThrowa to come over to our house to do work, I like her to come over just to relax and visit and be our guest, but seriously, she and Mr. Chatty saved our asses.

Anyway! Here’s what we did. I already blogged about the invitations over here, but I forgot to mention that the font used was Eager Naturalist. VERY KEY.

Once the boys arrived, we did a boy-centric craft, which was this:

We made little parachutes for Lego men. I got the instructions from this site. Basically you cut a 14 inch square from a plastic bag (I used white kitchen garbage bags), then cut 4 18-inch strings. Tie a 1-inch loop at the end of each string; use one end of each string to form a slipknot and loop it around the corners of the plastic, and then use the loops on the other four ends to wrap around the Lego man’s arms.

These worked awesome and the boys had a smashing time running up and down our stairs and dropping them off the upstairs landing. I had pre-cut the plastic and strings, and pre-made the knots in the end, so all that was left was the final assembly, but even then, FameThrowa and I wound up assembling them ourselves for the most part while boys waited around impatiently for their chance to THROW STUFF. Still, a good craft.

The hardest part was finding the Lego men. We wanted the boys to be able to take one home with them, but the Captain did not want to part with his Lego men, so I had to buy some new ones. Lego doesn’t sell a lot of sets with just minifigs in them, so I ended up buying several sets to get the right number of men. In the end the craft cost a bit more than I had planned due to Lego expenditures.

Next up, we paused for a pizza break, and then we played this Star Wars guessing game. I made up little cards with Star Wars characters on them, like this:

The boys took turns going one at a time. The boy in question would put on a baseball hat with one of these cards taped to the front — he didn’t get to see it. Then he had to ask questions of the other boys — is it a good guy? is it a robot? does he have green skin? — to try to guess who he was.

This game was a huge success. The boys loved it and (thankfully) they all knew enough Star Wars characters to play. Any number of kids could play, so we started the game as soon as a few kids were done eating and then the others joined in as they finished eating too. There were no prizes for “winning,” but each kid got to keep the card of the person they were, and that was like SOLID GOLD CHOCOLATE, they were so excited.

I made the cards by grabbing images from the internet, so I can’t post my file here, I’m sure it’s totally illegal. But if you are interested, just email me and I’ll mail you the file.

Oh, and I almost forgot, the font used for the “Darth Vader” text is Digital Strip.

After the game we decorated cupcakes:

And then we opened the gifts, and then we watched the movie. By the time we started the movie, all the adults were legally deaf. Seriously, nine six-year-old boys in one house is VERY VERY VERY VERY LOUD.

In the end, the movie we chose was The Adventures of Clutch Powers (Alert — this link automatically plays a video, man, I hate that). It’s a new direct-to-DVD Lego movie. Clutch Powers is kind of a MacGuyver of Lego and goes on missions to help people, building the stuff he needs on the fly. It was basically an hour-long ad for Lego, but boy, did our party guests ever eat it up. Ten minutes in, the loudest noise was the sound of crunching popcorn. They were HOOKED.

THANK GOD.

The movie is not great, but not bad either, and extremely safe for the six-year-old crowd. It was short enough, and since it was less than two weeks old, we felt confident that no one would have seen it (although I did have word searches and dot-to-dots available for those who did not want to watch). Plus, the movie went with our party theme — we made Lego men, and we gave Lego packs as the take-home gift, so the Lego movie kind of pulled it all together.

Anyway! By seven o’clock we were SO ready for everyone to go home. The boys got a gift bag with Lego inside:

And they got a balloon:

Font used on the gift bag tags is my new favourite font, Black Boys On Mopeds, which is also the name of a beautiful song by Sinead O’Connor. Love them both!

Once the last boy was gone we put the kids to bed and then poured some stiff drinks. Until next year!