Nate's Percy Jackson Party

On Saturday we had Nate's family birthday get together! He had chosen Percy Jackson as his theme over a year ago, so he was super excited to finally have this day come.

Choosing food to have was actually really challenging. There really isn't a lot of blue food that you can make healthy, and there really wasn't any food that was super significant in the books that would be easy to make for a party. We did pretty good though! We had:

Cheeseburgers (not pictured). In one of the books, Percy is climbing and struggling...and his stomach is BEGGING for a cheeseburger!

Percy's Pasta Salad! When I was boiling the pasta, I put in blue food coloring (it turned out greenish, though), and made a Greek pasta salad. Nate thought it was so great that it was blue pasta and honored the Greek-ness of the books.

Ambrosia, the food of the gods. Okay, so it's just fruit salad with vanilla yogurt, but it worked and was super yummy.

Medusa's Cheese Ball. I needed another food for the party, but was really struggling. I ended up seeing a Medusa ice cream sundae on Pinterest (mint chocolate chip ice cream with chocolate snakes coming out of the top), and thought it could be easily adapted as a cheese ball! I cut up a cucumber that was in a "c" shape for the snakes.

Nectar, drink of the gods. Better known as lemonade for us mortals!

I apologize in advance for the grainy and blurry present pictures; I was on the other side of the room and the glare from the door didn't help very much. Our boy received:

Hand weights! He's very into being active and getting stronger.

Settlers of Catan Seafarer's expansion board game. He played this expansion at his aunt and uncle's, and has been begging for it ever since! Settlers of Catan is definitely one of our favorite games.

A new target for archery! He can't wait to try it out.

Ear buds for his school computer. And they're BLUE! Percy Jackson would approve.

A Tim Horton's gift card. Donuts? Yes please! 

He also got a couple Lego sets, his favorite body wash (how is my boy old enough to be using Old Spice?!??), and swim goggles.

For his cake, I dyed the cake mix blue and then did an almost ombre blue cake to look like water. I did a yellow frosted trident on top in honor of Poseidon, and then had his 10 candles around the cake. We could not find a '1' and '0' candle that matched anywhere! Stores either had the '1' or the '0', but not both, and none of the candles in any store we visited matched the style at another store. Thankfully Wegmans had one set of all blue candles!

It was a really nice time with all of the family! The cousins had a great time playing together, some of the adults and kids played a board game, and there was a lot of visiting between all the families as well. We were really bummed, though: we actually had the back all weeded and gorgeous and the pool all ready for swimming, and it was cold and rainy all day! I think there's only been one or maaayyybe two years since we've been in the house that the weather has been nice for his party. It was also a bittersweet day as it's the last birthday party (and maybe formal get together) at this house.

Nate is already counting down to next year's birthday party as he'll get his very own Harry Potter party (Paige had one when she turned 11 as well), but I think the next year can go by nice and slow, wouldn't you agree? ;)