Faith's 7th Birthday

We celebrated Faith's 7th birthday yesterday with a Big CARNIVAL Party.

Of course we went overboard, but the kids and I had a great time planning and decorating.

 At any good carnival you must have carnival games.  We had 10 of them.  And instead of scary toothless carnies (carnival workers), we had older neighbor kids come help run the games.

Here they had to guess which cup had the ball.  They could play the games as many times as they wanted and they could collect lots of tickets.

Ring the Root Beer was popular and not too hard.

Throwing a ping-pong ball into the fishy cups was a little tougher.

Eventually I had to shut down Bethany's game because the kids were racking up way too many tickets on it.

The hula-hoop throw.

Elinor manned the penny toss.

You can imagine that this one was popular with the little boys.

I particularly enjoyed Jacob's enthusiasm in being our carnival clown.

All those tickets they collected playing games were then to be used to buy their concessions.

The kids and I spent some time trying to decide how much everything should cost.  We wanted to make sure everyone would have enough to buy lunch.

It worked out just right and I love that George is wearing his doggie costume.

We even had a little petting zoo in the backyard with the rabbit and the turtle.  Which turtle escaped from it's enclosure and is currently AWOL.  

After lunch the kids went to play more games and earn more tickets so they could go visit the prize shop.  

Once again, it was a trick to price things just right so that everyone could get some stuff, but not everything.  We had fun planning the prize shop.

Our decorations did take quite a bit of time, but crepe paper and tape are cheap and it was our art project for the week.

A few more pictures of the fun.

Everything worked out just as we hoped and it was great fun.  Happy birthday, Faith!