After Jayke got so excited over the Percy Jackson books, Ethan decided that he should give them a try. Just a little background on Ethan: He is my reluctant reader. He can read, but does not like to. at.all. It has been a struggle to get him to read anything and really only reads what he has to for his school assignments, and never for pleasure. That is, until he found the Percy Jackson series. Now these are not your typical small books that you can read in 30 minutes. These are inch-thick books. We own 3 of the first 5 books (numbers 1, 2, and 5), so when he finished book #2, he asked if he could go to the book store to buy the next one-with his own money. I gladly took him to 2 different bookstores, but everyone was out of book 3. I decided to check the libraries. Both the Mesa library and the county library were out of every single copy, so I ended up placing a hold at both libraries. Just when we finally had a copy ready, Ethan found it at his school library. He couldn't stand to wait any longer. He finished book 3 in about a week and was ready for book 4. I put a hold on the books at the library, and on the day I went to pick it up, he had already checked it out at the school. He ended up finishing all five books in about 8 weeks, and that only because the first book took him 3 weeks to finish. Quite often, we would find him still awake at midnight, reading in bed with a flashlight. He LOVED those books!
Since Ethan has a summer birthday, we decided to have his party before the end of the school year so he could invite his friends that he has hung out with this year, rather than have it in the fall and have to invite friends that he didn't know very well. As the theme of his party, Ethan chose Percy Jackson and Camp Half-blood. I had all the activities planned and my list of needed items ready and went out shopping. I went to several stores searching for toy swords and no body had them, so I opted to make our own out of paint sticks and cardboard. It was a little more work than I had planned, but they still worked.
The party started out with the kids painting their swords and shields. I didn't get a picture of this part, but you can see them in the background of one of the other pictures.
While the swords and shields dried, we went outside to start our Camp Half-blood. Camp Half-blood started with a Cheetos toss and quickly escalated into a full on Cheetos war.
I gave one of the kids the bag of Cheetos with instructions to dump in on Ethan. He was more than happy to do so.
After the Cheetos war, we went inside to get ready for canoe races. We used seed pods from a neighbor's tree as the base for the canoe and let the kids do whatever they wanted to it to try and improve their chances of winning.
(You can see the swords and shields on the counter behind Ethan in this picture.)
This is what the majority of the canoes looked like when they were finished. Once everyone was finished, we went outside to test their creations.
Armed with straws, they were ready to race! Many of them realized that as soon as they started blowing on the sails, it shifted the balance and most of the canoes just sank. After a while, they realized if they took off the sail and just blew into the seed pod that it would stay afloat and still move. Others still couldn't get their canoes to move, so they just pushed them with the straws.
After the canoe races, we went inside to fight off the evil things from the dark forest by throwing newspaper balls into a tape web while Ryan cooked the hot dogs.
When the hot dogs were finished, everyone sat down and ate until their parents showed up.
On the menu were hot dogs, cheetos, smores, strawberries, blue cupcakes (that looked green compared to the frosting), and blue Kool-aid.
I ended up piping some blue frosting into the strawberries for decoration. The kids loved it!
The "blue" cupcakes with blue frosting. They even had fish sprinkles on them.
The s'mores were also a hit. One of the boys said it was the best marshmallows he's ever tasted.
Overall, I think the party turned out well. Ethan had a blast and I guess that's all that matters. :-)
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