Corbyn's Birthday: Friend Party

In May before we left for our trip to Hawaii, we had Corbyn's friend birthday party because the Howard family was going to be moving while we were gone and like last year, we couldn't celebrate Corbyn's birthday without Rhys.

When Tay and Martha watched Corbyn and Peyton for us while we looked for a house in Oregon, they introduced them to the wonders of Netflix. Around that same time Jared convinced my parents to pay for Netflix for our 4 Ririe families since you can have up to 4 screens on an account. Corbyn had never seen Ninjago before that, but was quickly hooked and decided to have a Ninjago theme for his friend party. After some quick searching on Pinterest I discovered all you have to do is print out some yellow Ninjago eyes (like these) and stick them on everything and you have a Ninjago party.

I made the invitations based on this Ninjago invitation.

We had yellow cupcakes frosted like the red ninja.

And ninja fruit boxes in all the different Ninjago colors.

Rog put the kids through ninja training by playing Sensei Says.

Then they decorated ninja stars (folding directions here).

And they earned their ninja black belts by throwing their ninja stars at each other. (And unfortunately Alexis' brother figured out he could pop the ninja balloons with them.)

When they got tired of throwing their ninja stars, we tied on their black belts and armed them with swords. (Rog taught himself how to make balloon swords by watching videos on YouTube.)

The ninjas: Hazel Howard, Austin Forsberg, Easton Dunn, Jack Hendricksen, Corbyn, Alexis, Peyton, Rhys Howard, and Hope Jones. (Not pictured Calla Howard and Alexis' brother.)

They had fun fighting each other and the ninja balloons (that hadn't been popped yet by the ninja stars).

Finally we played Don't Eat Pete. (I adapted the Ninjago Bingo board in this Ninjago Printables Pack to make the board.)

For party favors we gave out some assorted Lego bricks with a fortune cookie and a little ninja (from a set of them I found at Partyland). I got the idea for the tag here. 

Here's the back of the tag. I thought this was a pretty clever way to tie in the Lego bricks with the Ninjago theme.

The kids pretty much opened their bags immediately and started building their own creations with the Lego bricks, so I'd say they were a success!

It was a fun party! I'm glad Corbyn got to have one last shindig with this Utah friends before we moved away. He has made friends here, but it makes me super sad to think Rhys won't be at his friend party this year!