The planets were a blast to put together! For the sun I tried using watercolors on a white lantern and it just wasn't working, time to use plan B. I had some yellow tissue paper and had the kids help tear it into pieces. I got out my spray glue and got to work spraying and sticking. It became quite the sticky situation for a while but it turned out awesome! Way cooler than if I'd just watercolored it. Jupiter was next, using more tissue paper strips to glue on the stripes and the eye of Jupiter's storm. I thought the perfect thing for Saturn's rings was tin foil and it was perfect. I think next time I would glue it on instead of just wrapping it. It looked great all wrinkled up and wrapped but it did require two rings that way. However, after my sun experience with the spray glue, I wasn't quite up to the challenge of spray gluing again. Last, came planet Earth. I simply printed off a map of the world, put it on some green tissue and cut it out. I definitely needed to use a larger size but time was running out. I hung them from the ceiling with some fishing line and a clear tack and there we had our planets....definitely not to scale.
Getting creative with the refreshments was a blast! I had planned on having a chocolate pudding dessert and calling it Mars Mud but changed my mind last minute and made dirt cake instead. Since it is white, I chose to call it "Moon Mud". We had red kool-aid for "Rocket Fuel", circle pretzels for "Saturn's Rings" and puff corn for "Astronaut Asteroids". I was just going to call them asteroids but thought we needed a little something extra. We used puff corn because our youngest can't eat popcorn so it was safe for her and it turned out, completely safe for an allergy guest. We also had a fruit and veggie tray with no fun names this time around.
The rocket ship cake was so fun to make! I used a football shaped pan for the rocket and a mini soccer ball pan for the moon. I used a variety of tips to decorate and Aidan requested to be the astronaut on the cake. I completely forgot to add the stabilizing fins that I wanted to put on and also ran out of time to add my fondant stars to the sky.....I knew I should've cut them out the night before! Overall, I love how it turned out. It was so fun to create this cake for him.
Since he was turning four, I knew I needed some activities, but not too much to overwhelm the kids. I had planned on making some blow rockets and practiced making them with Aidan but it was something that we ran out of time to get everything together and it was okay. I had planned on using a blowup mattress for our "Anti-gravity training area" but we ran into some friends the day before the party and they offered up their bounce house....it turned out perfect! Aidan got some stomp rockets for his birthday and we used those in the "Rocket launch area". The kids also spent some time playing trains in our front room and overall, just had a great time playing together.
I absolutely love making my kids' dreams come true when I can and their birthday parties are so fun to plan and create. I can't wait to find out what he asks for next year, and I can't wait until Isabella starts asking for her wishes played out in a birthday party!
Happy Birthday to my favorite four year old boy, Aidan! Love you, buddy!
