Connor's 8th Touchdown Party!

Every year its getting to be more of a challenge to come up with a fun and entertaining idea for Connor's birthday. Soon, he'll just want a friend or two to spend the night and these days will be over, so I'm trying to get the parties in while we can.

The idea for this year's party was his. Months ago he said (and never really wavered) "Mom, I want to have a football party". For me, that wasn't alot of guidance. But, thankfully, in today's world we have Google and "the collective intelligence" available to me on the the internet yielded great ideas for such a party.

The invitations were training camp draft notice letters to each "player". At the party, they had an official sign in:




After that they picked up their Player ID badges which I made for each of them with their actual photos and a list of the "drills" we'd be doing on the back. Also, they each got an official Gatorade sports bottle just like an NFL player.



We then moved over the park a block away for the training camp fun where we had a camp warm up:



Some throwing drills:




Receiving drills:



And agility drills that didn't always work out quite so well!



After nearly two hours of that, the kids were wiped out and we came back to the house for pizza, wings, and cake. NOTE TO SELF: Kids love wings. They inhaled them.





It was a great party in no small part to the very hard work of many of our friends. I underestimated severely the coaching and support staff we would need for this Training Camp and they made it work. Mike helped Bob set up the field and even ran to the Home Depot for field chalk when the one I bought didn't work. Ralph ran many of the drills. Jeff and Travis kept the kids in line and helped with other drills. Jen took almost all of these photos and helped me put together our grown up dinner for afterward along with Carole who arrived and 60 seconds later had been enlisted to slice up 3 pounds of flank steak. She also, as usual, was the best mom in the house and made sure everyone was cleaned up and generally accounted for.



Connor was really happy. He came over to me toward the end of the day and hugged me and looked up at me with those young boy eyes and said "Mom. This is the best birthday party ever. Thank you for doing it for me." Wow.

And it can't go without saying that my baby boy was an angel through the whole thing!