Natalie's Birthday (including Castle pinata)

Natalie wanted a "Super Why" themed birthday party again this year, but with the specific focus being the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk". We decided it would be the most fun just to focus on the adventure of getting to the castle in the clouds (not the whole angry giant and stolen goods aspects of the story!). To that end, we painted a bunch of oatmeal canisters green to be our "beanstalk" and we also made a castle pinata. Poking around the web, I came up with some ideas on how to make it a pull-string pinata so it would be reusable (and safe to do inside!).

I made a mini-album on FaceBook showing/describing how I made the pinata, hopefully this link will take you there:

Castle Pull-String Pinata

We played several games with the kids:
"Catch the Cows" (blind man's bluff with everyone on their knees moo-ing);
"Magic Bean" Bingo;
"Cloud Hop" (jumping across the living room from shape to shape, each time across one "cloud" disappearing --- kind of like a non-competetive cake-walk);
and "Don't Wake the Guard Dog" (which is like red-light-green-light).

After each game we added some pieces to the beanstalk. Here are Natalie and most of her guests (one was being too shy for the group shot) in front of the cabinet where we built the beanstalk up to the castle...


With no sticks involved, Daddy (Matt) was quite willing to hold the pinata for us:


After the games and pinata, we moved on to presents and then cake. Having spent quite a lot of time on the pinata, I was fortunate to persuade Natalie that a simple cake would be fine... I'd seen little plastic "Super Why" cake topper character on the web, but we made our own by printing out the characters onto cardstock and mounting them on handles from plastic forks. Yummy chocolate cake (of course!), a few Cool Whip "clouds", and there ya go:


After cake & ice cream, we just let the kids play with Natalie's new stuff until their parents collected them...