A couple weeks ago we realized that all the kids’ friends are also leaving this summer, and many of them BEFORE us!  So, we passed out invitations and began getting excited for a joint birthday party.  Zoe has been talking about her birthday plans for months…. willie wonka for a while, but then she came up with a fun history party.  On her own during quiet time one day she made a cute little chart labelling what part of history each room in the house could be.  Avi love the idea, too, as long as his room could be Mesopotamia and he replaced a room with an Egypt theme.  With a little more brainstorming together we came up with simple activities that could be done in each room, then Zoe created a Travel Passport I photocopied for each guest when they arrived.  In each part of history that they visited, the kids could do an activity and get a sticker in their passport.

We spent a few afternoons painting some long paper murals to create the different parts of history, and had to make our pinatas from scratch since the BX has been out for weeks. It was a perfect time for preparation as we had been doing standardized testing all morning last week, so afternoons at home lazing and crafting was fun.

Birthday morning was super fun finishing up the decor.  Zoe was so excited to be hostess, and Avi was so excited his friends were coming over to enjoy.   Here are the different rooms they visited…not in this order…. they went chronologically.

I think it went great!  Everyone had a lot of fun.  Again, we did no gifts as the kids don’t need anything AND it’s quite far from their actual birthdays.  The animal shelter didn’t need anything this year, either so we didn’t do donations; just come and have fun!