Happy birthday Ryan!

Today we celebrated Ryan's 7th birthday.  According to him it was the best birthday ever.  Woo hoo!  At least we're doing something right around here.  

Ryan asked for a pitching machine for his birthday.  He has never shown any interest in baseball before, but recently we went miniature golfing and he saw some batting cages there.  He thought they looked awesome, so that is what he got (on a much smaller scale of course).  He was outside practicing hitting balls at 7:30 in the morning. 

And being the smart boy that he is, he asked to have Kneader's chunky cinnamon french toast with creamy caramel syrup and whipped cream for breakfast.  You can never go wrong with that.

I told Ryan he could have a friend party this year, and his big dilemma was whether he should invite his real friends, or if he should just invite his entire school class, because he would get a lot more presents that way.  I told him it was up to him (dumb choice on my part).  However, with only the slightest of nudging, did he decide that he would invite his real friends.  I was quite relieved.  We decided a Mario Brothers party would be fun, and being the silly "home-made" kinda gal that I am, I got started on a lot of work to make his party fun.  We played a few games like

Pin the mustache on Mario

and a bean bag toss game with Boo

stomp the goomba  (balloons)

and don't drop Yoshi's egg. 

Of course we opened presents.

and ate cupcakes that look like mushrooms.

A couple of other things that I thought made this party extra fun were these cute chocolate Mario mustache suckers,

and these coin boxes that we filled with chocolate gold coins as they completed each of their games.

I also thought these Boo balloons were about the cutest things I've ever seen.  I wish I had taken a picture of ours, but I forgot, so I'll just post the picture that was my inspiration for them instead.

We had an exhausting super fun time!  Happy birthday buddy!