February birthdays can be kind of a bummer. I know because I have one–and so does my son. So I try to throw parties for him that make people with summer birthdays jealous. There will be no awesome tail gate sledding party for you, Gemini. Ha ha!

This year, my son wanted a winter picnic party on the ice (take that, Cancers). Also requested were, marshmallows, glow sticks, a cake shaped like a 6, and popcorn. All birthday wishes granted! I wasn’t too sure how the cake would turn out, but it seems there is nothing more frosting can’t solve.

I stumbled on these glow swords at Target, and wow! were they a big hit! I had planned to have some sort of balloon game with glowing balloons (a la pinterest), but you need 1. clear balloons (not just white ones), 2. super bright glow sticks (not the skinny, cheapy ones from target), and 3. actual pitch black, not 7pm.   Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

The kids didn’t seem to mind.

Before the epic glow battle, we built a big fire and roasted marshmallows. By the way, roasted marshmallows in your hot chocolate is the best thing ever, which is also how my son described his party.  I have to agree–nothing better than turning 6 with a giant fire on a frozen lake!

Right before kcwc took off this year, we celebrated my daughter’s golden birthday. The theme was gold, because we are original like that. It was a fitting theme, but a little odd–not a lot of golden party games (oh I found one though)–so we went a little crazy with the decorations.

The giant golden 6 idea came from this post for a fringey monogram. The fringey detail is super cool, but it also takes quite a bit of time, so I took a short cut and used wrapping paper–glittery, golden wrapping paper! I drew a huge six on the wall with chalk, taped the wrapping paper over it, and then cut right inside the line I drew.  The whole thing took about 1/2 hour + 1 1/2 rolls of wrapping paper.  It looks wrinkley in the photo, but the paper (and my baseboards and my floor and my hands and my face) was so glittery that I didn’t notice until I took the picture.

The humongous glittery six looked a little plain, if you can believe it, so I added those shooty out lines all around it.  Blazzam! Then with the extra bit of wrapping paper I made a golden paper chain for above the picnic table.  You can see the crazy, glittery texture of the wrapping paper a bit better here.

The actual present was wrapped in golden wrapping paper too of course.  I think it’s a sweater…