It Is Your Destiny

to throw the best dang Darth Vader birthday ever.

Being now a veteran of some years' standing with respect to children's birthdays, I think I prefer boy parties to girls. Girl parties are fun to plan, but there's about a 50-50 chance that some of the girls won't buy in to whatever you're doing. More natural cynicism, perhaps? Not sure. But boys...boys dive in head first and require no cajolery. They just buy into the fantasy, right off the bat.

So this year, in spite of the fact that my boy has not actually seen Star Wars (too scary), we threw a Darth Vader party. It's what he wanted, even if he really doesn't know who Darth Vader is. So I went to the party supply store and bought some light saber-shaped water pumpers for $1.50 each, a soccer ball pinata, some Darth Vader party blowers and Star Wars stickers and confetti. The party ware was just plain red or yellow stuff -- plates, napkins and cups. We splurged on a Darth Vader mylar balloon for $8, but tried to use generic colors for everything else 'cause that trademarked stuff is expensive.

I carefully peeled the black tissue soccer ball pattern off the pinata and spray painted the whole thing silver. Then I glued on a 4" circle of paper over the fill hole and painted that silver as well. I painted a black equator around the middle and concentric circles on the round bit and voila! the Death Star, all ready for little boys to bash with the power stick of doom. Or whatever.

The cake was a little problematic, in that Target wouldn't sell me the cake art topper unless I ordered a cake to go with it. Soooo, we went and found a Lego set with Darth Vader in it (the only thing in the toy dept. we could find with the big bad guy in it) and used that instead. My son was pleased with the result, and I have to say it was the easiest cake I have done in ages.

We ran off pictures of Darth Vader and some Imperial Storm Troopers and covered them with clear contact paper before nailing them to a few of our trees. When the boys got their water pumpers, this is what they shot at before they started really getting into it and shooting each other.

The whole party lasted an hour and a half and it was perfect -- just long enough to get everything in, but not so long that anyone was saying "what else are we going to do?" Little boys were running around the yard yelling "I'm light saber man!" and "Come on Jedis!"

It was awesome. As my son said while he was refilling his pumper, "this is the best birthday ever!"