Jimmy's Magical Birthday with Friends

A week and a half after Jimmy' actual birthday, we made plans to celebrate in the most MAGICAL way -- with a hired magician to perform a magic show at our house.

At first, I planned to have the show in our living room, but the day before with Steve's suggestion, we chose to set up in the garage.  It gave us the chance to have the magician set up privately while the kids stayed inside the house and ate lunch.  The garage can be heated with our wood-burning stove (it used to belong to my grandparents) and I made some minor adjustments to the backdrop to make it all work.

Sophia helped the birthday boy fill all of the favor bags for his friends:

The favor bags were set up inside with some peanut butter blossom cookies for later.

I served chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, strawberries and apples inside and added a few small details here and there.  

The cupcake tower was a small labor of love.  I used large-sized playing cards and hot-glued them together to create a sturdy enough tower to hold the homemade cupcakes.  I always like to offer both cupcakes and cake.  In doing so, the cupcakes were vanilla and the cake was chocolate.  This was later moved out to the garage for the posse of boys to devour.

The audience of boys was set up in the garage and Jeff included all of them at one point or another so that it was a collaborative effort.  Even Jack was called up to participate.

The birthday boy was definitely involved:

Making magic happen!

Opening gifts from his friends:

Ainsley came over for the show; after all, she is Jimmy's birthday twin.  He was born on Ainsley's 7th birthday.  

The group of boys that joined us for the event:

The birthday boy and his cake.  

You should have seen his face when I showed him the finished product!  I purposely kept it a surprise and while he saw little bits and pieces while I was working on it, I don't think that he imagined how it would all come together.

As I was slicing it and handing out ice cream cups to the kids, I chuckled at how much they loved it too.  The bunny got split up among them -- one took the ears, another took a paw, etc.  It was perfect!