Jumping on the (Birthday) Bandwagon

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I somehow convinced my boys to have a combined birthday party this year....thank God! After much discussion we decided to have the party at an indoor trampoline facility called Sky Zone that just opened a few weeks ago.

When I booked the party I was given a stack of pre-printed invitations as a part of the package. Normally the craft-snob in me would scoff at these invitations, but I waited so late that I felt forced to use them. Or so I thought. When I pitched the idea to my kids, my oldest looked at me and said (cue the sad music) "but Mom, you always make our invitations". Ouch. I desperately tried to come up with valid reasons that a soon-to-be 9 year old would buy as to why I would not be making the invitations this year, but to no avail.

I had just started putting a design together when my youngest son declared that he would really love to have a pop-up card. Really? I only had 3 days to design and construct these invitations, so a pop-up card (that I've never made before) might be a stretch. And then my son gave me "the look". Needless to say, I made the invitations. Here is the outside of the card...

...and here is the inside - my kids are "jumping" out of the invitation. Please note that the enormous heads were my husband's idea - apparently it has something to do with sports.

Here's how the pop-up effect works - I found directions for this here.

I didn't care for the design on the cake that was included with the party package, so I decided to make a cake topper instead. I made a trampoline with the boys (again with big heads) jumping on it.

The trampoline was made out of foam paper and popsicle sticks...

Now that I had created custom invitations and a custom cake topper, I decided to complete the trifecta and create custom banners for the party. Each banner had my kid's name...

...and a birthday boy jumping on a trampoline.

According to my guys the party was a big success, so Birthday 2013 is officially a wrap!