life in the "nutt" house: Cars 2

By now, I don't have to explain that a birthday around here means a party that I get to plan. ;) However, this summer we are taking a vacation to Disney with Drew, my parents, sister and bro-in-law, their oldest son. (The babes are a little too young to enjoy the place and a lot of extra work, so they're both sitting this trip out and staying with grandparents. Next time, boys!) Anyways, since this will be a pretty major (and expensive) trip, we are saying "Happy birthday Drew - we're going to Disney!" We're even taking a plane, which is something he's been dying to do, so we're thinking that's a good enough birthday present, right? Of course we wanted to do a few little things around here to celebrate, so we had a family who actually often OFFERS (yes, amazing) to babysit the boys (and make it so fabulous that they never want to go home) join us for his birthday dinner. We let him pick the "menu" which was steak and strawberries, to which I added a few fillers. He was so thrilled with our company that night, which made me feel a little sad that we weren't doing something similar with his little buddies.
Since we had plans to take him to see Cars 2 that weekend, I thought maybe we could just ask a few of his favorite friends to go with us. I didn't even do invitations because, well, it was Tuesday, and we were going on Saturday, but when we asked them they all said yes. Then I thought, well, we could just do a little lunch here first and go to the theater together, so that was the plan. I wasn't going to do much decor for it because Cars is a very commercial theme and I just never really like the look of um, commercial. After a quick look though, I did find some cute ideas online to use for the party, including the idea to make each kid a little cardboard car. Naturally, I found these ideas Thursday morning, which meant we abandoned our day's plans and went shopping. Friday was a blur of cooking, cleaning, and spray painting -ha! (sidenote, whenever I use spray paint, my mind is flooded with memories of my dad and my dance recital ballet shoes from when I was growing up - I think he had to spray paint them to match my costume every year.) Maybe one day I won't do eeeverything last minute and turn into a total spaz the day of the party. Maybe.

So here are some pics of the mini-birthday party for year #5, in prep for a coming Disney full-birthday celebration. I am no photographer, so I missed a lot of the fun. Maybe one day I will be rich enough to hire a photographer for birthday parties. Maybe.

It's my party tomorrow!!

We ate at Flo's Cafe, decorated cars and used them for a scavenger hunt race, and they each won their own tool box full of "Mater teeth", cars pez candy, cars tattoos and silly bandz.