Today is my son’s eighth birthday! Hard to believe how quickly eight years have gone by – we have been celebrating all weekend, kicking it off on Saturday with a birthday party with close friends. We’ve been trying to simplify the holidays around here so we stuck to just two close friends and their families and invited them to join us for pizza and arcade games at a local pizzeria then back to our place for cake and ice cream and a movie.

First we needed to send them an invite. We had a loose Doctor Who theme (of course) for the party and I spent a lot of time looking online for graphics to make something fun. I loved this idea but wanted to incorporate the Doctor and make it our own. But I downloaded her template and played around with it on picmonkey – I googled for images of Matt Smith’s Doctor online because he’s my son’s favorite and this was the end result:

I put in coordinates of the location of the pizzeria on our invitation which you can get just by looking for the location on google maps and then right clicking on the location and clicking “what’s here” – the longitude / latitude coordinates will show up in the search bar. Rather than fussing with printing the invitation and finding envelopes and postage, I just emailed the whole image to each friend’s mother and printed out one copy for the birthday boy who thought it was the coolest thing ever – and the whole thing cost me basically nothing except time and a bit of ink and paper.

I tried to keep it simple for party decor – we get pretty far on plates and napkins around here. I did decorate some goodie bags to look like the TARDIS again just googling for images online and printing and cutting and pasting them to the bag. I made the window squares in picmonkey just by making a bunch of layered square shapes.

Since the boys ate their weight in pizza beforehand and were having cake and ice cream – snacks were just some popcorn, pretzels and lightly salted chips.

The cake ended up just being store bought cupcakes because  I was rushed and injured (I’m always injured, aren’t I?) or maybe I just like a good excuse to get out of baking for some reason. Anyway, we bought a few packs of Jammie Dodgers at World Market (the Doctor’s favorite cookie) and broke them in half and stuck each half on top of a cupcake to decorate, which left just enough room for a candle for MM to blow out.

Otherwise it was a very low key night – we put on Despicable Me for the kids and they actually sat and watched it! By the time the movie ended it was wayyyyy past everyone’s bedtimes so his friends headed home and the kids went to bed and everyone was happy and birthdayed out. A successful evening for sure!

MM got a lot of fun presents from family and friends but he was especially smitten with these Hero Factory lego thingies which he spent the rest of the weekend working on.

Another successful birthday behind us and a very happy eight year old birthday boy!