Ben's 5th Birthday Party Part 1

We celebrated Ben's 5th birthday yesterday with an army themed party with his friends. It was a super fun day!! There were 8 little boys from church, school and the neighborhood at the party. I think they all had a great time. We did a lot of fun things and really tried to carry the army theme through the whole party. I found some really fun ideas on Pinterest. I worked really hard not to overdo it but still have a fun party.

This is what the invitation looked like. It was just a pre-printed fill in type invitation. I offered Ben a bunch of different options and this is what he wanted!

Here is the cake table. It was pretty simple with just balloons and decorations from Party City. To keep things simple we just served cake and ice cream and had drinks.

We searched all over the internet for the perfect cake. He finally picked one and we took it to the lady who makes our cakes and this is how it turned out! Super cute with a tank and army men!

We had the whole party in our backyard. I was so worried about the weather because it was risky to plan an outdoors party in February. The weather was about as good as we could expect. It was mid 50's and sunny. There was a pretty strong breeze at times that made it pretty cool but it wasn't too bad. We had the food and eating table set up on the back porch.

The eating table just had an army scene set up on it that the boys could play with while they ate.

The biggest hit of the party was the obstacle course!! My dad did an amazing job setting up an obstacle course that they had to run through. It had a couple low crawls, dodge obstacles, hoops and ladders they had to climb over. The boys had a blast with it!! I have lots of pictures from the actual party of the boys going through it but here is what it looked like all set up.

Matt and Ben made each boy their own marshmallow shooter gun. They just used directions off youtube and made it from items at Lowe's.

And there were big bags of ammo for each boy! They had a blast shooting each other and having battles.

Here is the birthday boy all dressed up for the party. All the boys wore camo and we had a dog tag, tattoos and camo head bands for them. We also did their faces in camo if they wanted. They all looked so cute and ready for battle. Matt's mom made Ben a special camo shirt with his name on it!

We were so proud of Ben because he chose to have the guests bring items for care packages to be sent to soldiers overseas instead of a gift for him. We had a big box set up for them to put their items in.

We got so many great items that we will be sending to several different soldiers!

It was a great party! Can't wait to show more fun pictures from the actual party...