It was golden

You already know how much I love a party with a theme and a color scheme.

So, when we realized that this year was my oldest son's Golden Birthday, I immediately kicked into party-planning mode to try to come up with the ultimate celebration. But alas... all of my Google searches for "golden" and "party" resulted in 50th anniversary party ideas.

We wanted something off the beaten path. My son hates loud, noisy places. Chuck E. Cheese, Enchanted Castle and even laser tag were out for him. Instead, here's what we came up with.

My boy loves the outdoors. But could we really plan an outdoor party the 7th of November? (His birthday was actually the 9th.)

Believe it or not, it was unseasonably warm the day he was born. And it has been remarkably warm the day of his party almost every year. But still, with this year's funky weather, it made me very nervous.

I tried to convince him we should move the party to October. Chances were much better of a nice day a month earlier. "No Mom, I have faith it's going to be a nice day," he said. (Turns out, it rained almost every weekend in October!)

We decided to check out a brand new nature center that opened a few months ago in the city where we live. Not only did the nature center have a nice meeting room, but it had an extensive array of trails behind it.

As soon as we started hiking, my son's creative mind took him to his favorite destination: Narnia. He told me his party would have to be in the "Golden Age" of Narnia.

"Great," I thought. "HOW will I pull that one off?"

Sure enough. There really was a Golden Age of Narnia. It was a time of peace after Edmund, Peter, Susan and Lucy became royalty in the land.

We sent out invitations with a Narnia picture and a gold background. Decorating was easy! I just bought lots of gold.



Our main activity was a search for gold and treasure in the land of Narnia.

I divided the kids into four teams of four. Each one was assigned an adult guide.



I gave each team a letter from "Aslan" explaining their assignment, a "map" of Narnia and 12 pictures of 12 locations where they would find hidden treasure. They were looking for spots like this:


and this:




Once they found one of the locations, they would find four brown paper bags.

They were labeled #1 in gold, #2 in silver, #3 in purple (amethyst) and #4 in green (jade). The team that arrived at that point first would take the first bag and so on, so that every team got a bag at each spot.

The bags contained candy or other prizes in matching colors. I filled them with junk... I mean treasures, like Rolo candy in gold wrappers, Hershey's kisses in silver, suckers in purple or green, gold compasses, mini recorders (like Mr. Tumnus's flute), coins and whatever else I could find.



The treasure hunt was definitely a challenge, but lots of fun.

After that, they played hide-and-go-seek for the birthday boy.



Then, reluctantly, we went inside for cake. I used my cake pan with the heart shape in the middle, which was filled with caramel ice cream. I just drizzled some caramel sauce on the top to give it a little "gold" and put some Narnia characters around the outside.



Oh, and the weather?

It was 73 degrees and sunny. The kids were running around in shorts and t-shirts.



We even went outside on the "rooftop garden" to open gifts.



So, for all of you who enjoyed the beautiful weekend, you can thank my son. We have been praying for months that he would have weather even HALF that nice for his golden day!

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