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We’re pooped.
A bunch of rowdy pirates came by our house to dig for booty.

Blowing the cannons: (Amazingly, we didn’t burn down the ship!)

Party Details:
I baked for 10 hours, yesterday. Doug swabbed the deck. And the kids followed us around sticking fingers in freshly piped icing, leaving smudges on anything shiney, and dribbling toys. Our standards of cleanliness are a lot lower these days – last year, I bought touch up paint and washed then painted all the smudges off our walls. This year, I simply made sure that any job too tough for the Magic Eraser was camouflaged by shadows or well placed furniture.

The Invites were hand drawn pirate maps tied with red ribbons like scrolls. We aged the paper by running the edges over the burners of the stove. The few we had to mail were sealed in regular envelopes with candle wax.

Because all of our friends nap around noon, we opted for a morning party with bagels, cream cheese, cheeses and fruits. Not very pirate-like, but easy and pretty. I wish I had pictures of the platters, as the fruit certainly looked dramatic.

We had 40 guests, so I made 1 cake and 48 cupcakes from Birthday Cakes – Paw Paws Caramel Cake, Comfort’s Coconut Cake, and Gramma’s Texas Fudge cake (because I never pass up the chance to experience “Texas”). I made the caramel cake by the book, but iced the fudge cake with chocolate buttercream. The coconut cake was the inside of my pirate ship and after fondling the fondant all night, I don’t think we’ll be eating that. Here’s all the cake:

We drew up four pirate maps and hid 4 boxes of things around the yard. The four eldest each got to open a map and direct the group to the hiding spot. The treasures were bandanas, gold hoops and eyepatches, daggers by doug, and a chest filled with necklaces, rings, bracelets, chocolate gold coins. I thought for sure the bandanas, eye patches and earrings would be filler, but the dads and the 4 year olds were eager to tie them on. Of course the daggers were a hit, and you can see from the picture above that by the time we got to the treasure chest, everyone was fully in character.

This was the last stand for our trusty compost bin box house. We topped it with a pirate flag and called it a pub. Then, packed it up after the party and sent it off to be recycled.

The pirate ship/Dell server box didn’t survived 20 kids. Doesn’t Will look just thrilled? You’d never guess it was his birthday.

The highlight:
Will told me this morning, “I don’t want to be a pirate. I want to be Captain Batman.”