Happy 8th Birthday, Nate and Ben!

Today is Nate and Ben's birthday. Woohoo! Since today is also the first day of school, we decided to celebrate their birthday this past weekend. And learning from experience from Karis' birthday, we just had each boy invite one other friend. We knew that would be plenty. So with little boys invited, party plans were under way.

The boys chose a Star Wars theme this year - which proved to provide very easy party planning. We took the kids out to see the new Star Wars Clone Wars animated movie, which opened this past weekend. Our boys loved it! (Kurt said it was okay, and other adults, and even a fellow student, have said it was boring. I guess our boys are easily entertained. :)

After the movie we ate at Valentinos, a great pizza place here in Nebraska. It has a buffet, which was wonderful considering two of our guests had particular tastes. ;) After dinner, presents and cake, the kids went into the game room at the restaurant and enjoyed letting out some of their pent up energy. Oh man! They had a ball playing the games, winning tickets, then cashing the tickets in for "lovely" prizes. You know - cheesy, cheap toys. But the kids didn't care.

I have to say, I think the party was a success. Nate and Ben had been just completely and utterly excited - nearly jumping out of their skin excited. So I'm glad they had such a good time. :)

Here's a quick preview of our time:

Nate and Ben and their friends. Kurt's parents also came with us, and of course Karis, too. So it was a crowd of nine. Just the guys and Karis watched the movie, though. Kurt's mom and I did a little shopping and errand running. :)

The Light Saber Cake

It really was a simple idea - thanks to examples from a friend (thanks, Kari!) as well as online. It took a little while to cut and assemble everything (considering we had three different kinds of cakes), but I thought the end result turned out pretty good. We did have a few tears from Ben who decided after the fact that he wanted his light saber red instead of blue, but he got over it.

I decided to have the boys pose with the cake before the party got underway, as again, from experience, I figured they would not want to be having me taking a bunch of pictures during the party when all they wanted to do was eat cake. So here's Nate...


And can you see the difference in this one?


Now Ben's turn...


And another slightly different one...


Yup, that Karis wanted to be in every picture. It was quite funny. So here's the whole gang...


And then just the boys:


And another reason I was glad to have taken these earlier pictures?

We got to skip the restaurant customers in the background, friend Kyle pulling down his eyes, and Nate looking cross-eyed. Ha!

So Happy Birthday, boys! You're big eight year olds now! :)