Sam's birthday party

Sam has only had one friend party in his life. He was three. He had four friends over. We went to the splash pad and then came back to our house for lunch and cupcakes.

A few months ago I read an article about how many kids never get invited to parties and how it's so great when you invite the whole class over together. So I had an idea to have a water-themed party and invite his entire class to hang out in our backyard and do water activities. Then I realized how nuts that would have been.

Instead, we let Sam invite 5 friends to go go-kart racing. (Good thing, too, because it was unnaturally cold that day. 60 degrees or something.) Thunderbolt Racing does a party package where six kids can race twice and then they provide a party area, ping pong table, and ice cream cake. Sam and his friends had lots of fun! Some of them had never raced before so it took them a while to figure it out, but once they did, they were going pretty fast! The winner was the person with the fastest lap of 12 laps.

All the boys. I love how they wore their skull caps almost the entire time.

 Connor, Sam, Brady, Charlie, Billy, Evan.

Game face. Kind of.

 I'm so glad they had the ping pong table, Between each race, they had to wait for adults to race and it took a while. I don't know what we would have done without it.

 Although six eight-year-olds playing at one table was nerve-wracking. Especially when one of the boys chased the ball over the gate and into the track area...

 This is how Afton spent most of the party - playing on Dan's phone. And we didn't get any pictures of Eli because we were busy chasing him around.

 Ready to race!

 During the racing, Dan went and picked up some Costco pizzas. Then we had ice cream cake.

 I've never volunteered in Sam's class because you can't bring younger siblings, so it was nice to see his friends and how they all get along.

 In the end, Evan came out victorious. Sam got second and Brady third.

I think he had a lot of fun and I hope his friends did, too.