Chapman Family: Ryan's Amazing Birthday

Today I feel like a slacker mom, no I AM a slacker mom. I forgot my son. We're not talking about forgetting to pick him up at school or hurriedly loading all the kids in the car only to realize half-way down the road that I'm one kid short (although I wouldn't put that past me either). I forgot to blog about him. Not just a cute little thing he happened to do one day....I forgot to blog about his BIRTHDAY. A BIG BIRTHDAY with a party and all. It was brought to my attention the other day when my kids were going through my blog reminiscing at all of the pictures and events over the past while. Ryan came up to me and with his sad puppy-dog eyes and eyelashes flapping, said, "why didn't you write about my party?". I kind of gave him a sideways glance and in my "you're out of your mind" voice, said, "Of course I blogged about your party". He told me that he had looked through a lot of posts and never came across it. Thinking that his version of "looking" was similar to that of his dad's (where after he has "looked" for something and then recruits me, 9 times out of 10 I go to it immediately), I told him I would look into it.

Well, serve me up a slice of humble pie. Sure enough it was not there. I went from blogging about the trip to Vegas that the girls and I took in June, to the kids' first day of school in August. No July. I now see that disappointing my ever-faithful mother-in-law with lack of posts is not the only drawback to only blogging sporadically.

So, with my tail between my legs, I now present: Ryan's 10th birthday, and his AMAZING RACE party. Sorry it took me over 7 months to get this post up. I love you, buddy. Thanks for putting up with your mom!

Ryan's birthday party was a lot of fun last year, but it was HOT. It was so hot and miserable, that I was really worried about all of the outdoor tasks that the kids had to do and worried about dehydration and heat exhaustion, so right before the party I made Dave go buy enormous Power Aids for each of the kids. We also had a lot of water activities to hopefully "cool" them off along the way. I think when all was said and done, everyone had fun.

The Cake (lovingly made by Sandra Green. We won this at the youth service auction last year):

The Teams:

Team Green: Erin Rodabough, Ryan, Lars Remund, Carter McCain

Team Red: Kae Remund, McKay Rodabough, Kaden and Nathan Liddell

Team Yellow: Megan Smith, Maddie, Natalie Rodabough, Bridget Furniss

Team Blue: Phillip (he defected from black), Dave, Jackson Hoyt, Christopher Faulkner, Tyler Hudson

Team Black: Allison Smith, Lauren Soto, Sophie

For the first task, they had to solve a word scramble about Ryan which led them to their next clue:

This clue was in a block of ice in the freezer. They had to figure out how to get the clue out of the ice:

They had to solve a jigsaw puzzle to get their next clue:

They had to slurp up Jell-o through a straw. This was harder than I thought. When we did this same task for Sophie's party two years ago, I had the team slurp the Jell-o from the same bowl and I thought that went too quickly, so this time I had them do it individually, but it ended up being a lot of Jell-o for each child:

One person from each team had to sort through a ton of Easter eggs that were strewn on the grass by the side of the house to find a cotton ball hidden in one:

To get their next clue, one member from each team had to put their hands behind their back, and using only their mouth, had to sift through a pie tin full of whipped cream to find a gumball. When they found the gumball, they had to chew it and blow a bubble.

Phillip was feeling left out and wanted some of the action too.

Cannonball Run: For this task they had to go to the neighbor's pool (thank you, Debra Meier) and each member of the team had to do a cannonball into the pool to get their next clue.

Once they got back to our house, one person from each team had to eat pieces of watermelon until they collected enough seeds to be able to spell "Ryan" with the seeds:

Everyone on the team participated in this task, relay style. One at a time, teammates filled up a cup with water from a bucket, had to hold it on top of their head and run to the other end to dump the remnants into another bucket. The trick was that there were holes in the cups so the slower they went, the more water they would lose before they got to the other side. They had to keep doing this until they filled the bucket to a "fill" line.

With their chaperons, they had to walk to the QT gas station around the corner and go to the worker behind the counter and say "Are you the QT cutie?" to get their next clue. In the envelope that the cashier gave them was money that they had to use to buy slushies for all teammates. They also had to buy something in the store that started with one of the letters in Ryan's name and bring that item back to the house.