Take me out to the ball game, Sports themed Birthday party

Landon turned 9 (last summer) and some days I feel like his life is passing me by too fast. I keep trying to hold onto all his little boy features but he is quickly becoming a young man. He is so smart and so helpful, accompanied by a lot of attitude and back talking, but that’s a phase, right?! He is very much into sports and wanted a sports themed birthday party. We sat down and decided on his cake and we both loved the idea of a Concession Stand type party. He opted to play kickball as the activity and decided that we would feed the kids dinner.

We got to work looking up ideas on Pinterest and came up with some really fun things. We are already a big sports geared family so we didn’t need a lot of ideas to pull off a Concession stand theme.

He wanted a baseball cake with a football underneath, The baseball ended up way larger in proportion to the football but he still loved it. I used regular icing so that I could really give the balls the look and feel of leather. I frosted both cakes and let them sit out for a few hours, when the frosting was no longer sticky to the touch I was able to start pressing it down and molding it to look like leather. It isn’t my finest work but it did what I wanted it to do. I learned a lot of lessons while making this cake, and with 3 boys and 1 on the way I’m sure I will have lots of opportunities to make more sports ball cakes.

Next we decided that no Concession stand is complete without candy, and lots of it. We had the idea to give each kid tickets and let them buy their food and candy, but in the actually production part of it we realized that it was mostly chaos so we decided to throw out the tickets and just limit the kids on the number of each thing they could have. We gave each kids bags for them to take all their candy home it, let mom and dad deal with the sugar high. Or something like that.

We had all the food I remember as a kid. I used to love to save up my money and take it to the Concession Stands at all ball games we went too.

I think the candy was the kids favorite part. Good thing I left that for the very end and like a mean adult I made them eat all of their food first.

We used yellow napkins as our penalty flags and popped some pop corn to put into brown bags for each of the kids to take with them to eat on the way to the park to play kick ball.

I was able to track down a Concessions sign from a blog through Pinterest. You can get the printable from Liz on Call.

I made the rest of the signs using Picmonkey.com.

You can see the Pinterest board for all of the ideas for the birthday party HERE (I’d love it if your would follow me too.)

The thing Landon said he loved most about the Concession Stands was that the chips all hung there waiting to be grabbed. So I got to work coming up with ideas for how to hang the chips. In the end I used some twine and strung it at two different lengths on either side of the talk cloth back drop and hung each bag of chips using clothes pins. I love the end result. The kids each picked a bag of chips to take with them to the kick ball game as well.

I had only ever started making “fancy” sugar cookies at Taytons birthday party the month before for I am still a newbie to the art of cookie decorating.

Whats a sports party with out some Super Bowl Rings? The winning kick ball team was able to pick out their rings first and then the opposing team was able to pick theirs out afterwards. The kids loved this part. Getting their own rings was like winning the kid lottery…. oh what its like to be a kid and have few cares in the world.

I found the little Go TEAM flags Free Printable over at Three Little Monkeys Studio. I attached them to the tooth picks using hot glue (burned the crude out of my fingers in the process. I’m pretty sure after all these years I have no feeling their any way.)

Each kid got a Gatorade before the game as well, because its HOT in Vegas in the Summer so I wanted to make sure the kids stayed hydrated. I found the super cute labels over at Space Ships and Laser Beams.

The kids had Nachos for dinner, along with some Chili.

We had a ton of veggies on the table because Landon is my Veggie FANATIC and requested them. I’m pretty sure my children were the only ones who actually ate any of the vegetables.

The watermelon of course was all GONE in minutes.

The whole spread.

We added the Nacho cheese and Chili to the chips during the party. I didn’t want to add it until the kids were ready to eat it, so that the chips did not become soggy. We had a little counter space reserved in the kitchen with an assembly line going to fill up the kids bowls.

We took the kids to the park and played a giant game of kick ball. I was really surprised at how few of the kids had actually played before. We had a few practice runs before the actual game started. We invited a whopping 22 kids to the party (our biggest yet) so that we could field both teams. We ended up having 16 total (including my 2 oldest) so we had an awesome turn out and were able to put 8 kids on each team with Noah being the all time pitcher. The kids had a blast!!!

After the game we all game back to the house and ate up our dinner before we open the presents and had some cake. It was so packed around that table and I LOVED it. It made me so grateful to have such a large table to fit all the kids.

Landon got a ton of Legos and sports stuff, so he was pretty much in heaven.

All in al it was a great birthday party for a great kid. This year he wants a football game for his activity… well see how well that one goes over.

Happy 9th Birthday sweet boy.

For his invites I again took to PicMonkey and made his birthday invites into Sports Stadium tickets. It wasn’t until after hubby and I proofed it, and printed it, had Landon cut them all and than hand delivered them that we realized there was a misprint on the bottom of the ticket. Opps! Thankfully only one kid noticed and brought it up. Other then that I think they turned out really well.