Megan's 5th Birthday

Poor Megan was sick with a nasty stomach bug from Sunday through Wednesday of this week, when I finally took her to the doctor.  The doctor ruled out strep throat and appendicitis and said it must be a virus, but he was worried about dehydration so he prescribed her some Zofran.  Her birthday was on Thursday, and she was still feeling pretty awful.  She was finally able to keep Pedialyte and oyster crackers down on Thursday, with the help of the Zofran, but she spent the entire day on the couch watching tv and had two major tantrums because she was feeling so miserable.  So we decided not to tell her that it was her birthday; instead, we told her that her birthday was on Saturday.  She was feeling much better on Friday morning, and seems to be all the way back to normal today.  Her pretend birthday today was a very nice day!  She invited five friends over for a Jake and the Neverland Pirates birthday party, and everyone had a great time.

I baked her birthday cake on Friday afternoon, and as it was cooling, she informed me that she wanted a 3D pirate island cake, not just a flat one like I had been planning.  So I had to figure out how to make a mountainous island out of a single 9x13" cake.   It doesn't look like much, but it's actually pretty close to the island on the show, and Megan was thrilled with it.  It has A LOT of frosting on it.  You can see Bucky's cove with a waterfall on the left side and the treasure chest beach on the right side (covered with crushed up Nilla Wafer sand).  Megan is wearing an outfit to look just like the Izzy character on the show.

When all the kids were here, we started decorating treasure chests with jewels and foam stickers.  Everyone had fun with that; Megan has a very nice little group of friends who like to do crafts.

Then we played pin the treasure chest on the treasure map, because Megan wanted to play some kind of pin the tail on the donkey type game, and I found this small pirate game at Dollar Tree.  Everyone got their treasure chests pretty close to the x.

Then we finally had our treasure hunt.  I had made a big treasure map of our house and yard, and even singed the edges to make it look more realistic.  Ben had to take over the singing when I burned quite a large spot in our front yard and he was worried I'd set off the smoke detectors.  He took it outside and used a blowtorch instead.

I debated for a while how to do the treasure map; I thought about ripping the map into pieces and hiding the next piece at the x on the first piece, because I was worried that they would skip ahead to the final x if they could see the entire map at once.  But I ended up making seven little xs, and hiding part of the treasure at each x so they couldn't skip ahead.  Here they are finding a treasure box full of necklaces on the front porch:

And here they are digging for gold doubloons in the sandbox:

And here's Megan sliding down the slide after finding the Ring Pops hidden under the big inflatable Tick-Tock Crock, and walking the plank over the crocodile filled pond:

And here they are diving up more pirate booty after finding a treasure chest in the mailbox:

I think everyone liked the treasure hunt.  I made everyone stop and line up so that I could get a photo of the group:

Then we had lunch and opened presents.  Megan got a lot of Frozen themed things, which she was thrilled about.

And then we had cake.  Megan originally requested a slice of cake that included the top of the mountain and the beach, but since that would have been about half the cake, I gave her just the top of the mountain.

Two of my friends had stayed at the party with their daughters to help out, although the kids were so well behaved that we spent a lot of our time just chit chatting and letting the kids do their thing.  After the party was over, they stayed for a while so that the girls could have some extra play time.  The girls were having so much fun that they ended up staying an extra three hours being goofy! 

We finished the day off with a pancake and sausage dinner, per Megan's request.  Megan had a fantastic birthday!