Bilbo Baggins' Birthday

September 22 is Bilbo Baggins' Birthday! What more reason do you need to throw a party?

James and I drove around for hours one day searching for just the right park. We finally found it - Sugar Park here in Rio Rancho. It's perfect because it's up the hill from the road and surrounded by hedge so it's pretty hidden and the kids can't suddenly disappear from view. It also had several decent party trees. Score!

Once you have a suitable park, you need a welcome sign. Haha!

You also need Gandalf! All the guests should come in costume... Here we have a Gandalf, Frodo, and Arwen.

Here's another Elf and Hobbit.

Here's James as Bilbo with Steve as Frodo and our lovely neighbor child. Notice James's hairy feet?

And Bradley came as an elf.

I tried to pull off a Rosie Cotton sort of look. (And notice my hairy feet!)

Another hobbit child!

It's not a Hobbit Party without tables full of food! This table had Smaug the dragon, the Bag End Cake, and Roac, although I'm not sure he was quite so black as our crow...

I made some cooler covers to make our drinks look like they came from wine barrels. Ha! That was pretty fun. We had lemonade, root beer and water.

One of my amazing friends made a scavenger hunt for the kids that took them all through the park. It was fantastic! All of the clues were like riddles from the scene with Gollum and Bilbo and the kids had a great time searching for the treasure chest full of ring pops. The best part was about half-way through, when the younger kids just took off running as soon as we finished reading the clue. They would have no idea where they were going, but they knew they had to run and find a clue so the fastest kid got to lead the pack wherever he wanted...

Before it got too dark, we had the Desolation of Smaug, or the pinata breaking, as well as a smoke ring contest - or rather, bubble blowing with bubble pipes. The pinata was filled with gold coin chocolates, glow sticks, swedish fish (raw and wriggling), sour patch kids (hobbiton folk), life savers (rings), plastic gold rings with jewels on them, and I can't remember what else.

Up to this point, none of the kids had really made much of a dent and I was beginning to worry I had made the pinata too strong. (I don't have much background in pinata making.) But then Matthew went up, knocked the head off the dragon in one swing and ran away laughing half shocked I'm sure. Bradley was the only one who stayed to gather goodies.

The grand finale was fireworks! Yes, Gandalf brought fireworks! I called the fire dept and asked about fireworks laws and they said that NM laws allow for fireworks anytime of the year as long as there isn't a ban due to lack of rain. Sweet! I also found just one store in ABQ that sells fireworks year round and loaded up.

The next two picture are kind of cool. I didn't have any kids there of course but I was freaking out feeling like we couldn't see who was running off in the dark, so I gave each kid and lots of parents some glow in the dark bracelets and necklaces to wear. That worked like a charm! These two pictures are one with flash, and one without so you can see the glow effect. Great, huh?

This party turned out really great! Things to do for next time: get invites out earlier so that people have time to prepare costumes and themed food. Hire help for set up and take down. Buy everything earlier so I'm not stressing last minute.