Two weeks after his birthday, we finally had Ezra’s birthday sleepover this past weekend. He invited his two best friends — Henry and Emerson — and planned an entire day of activities. As you might expect, there were a few glitches, some additions and subtractions to the activity list, and one superdad who had to leave for a conference, but it was a fun day.
Ezra wanted the boys to sleep in the tent, so Bruce enlisted their help to set it up.
Our first glitch was an all-too-normal visit from Palo Alto’s finest for a “wellness check” on our neighbor.
This was the scene when Emerson arrived. Always fun to explain that situation to a parent you don’t know very well who is dropping off their kid for the night. Luckily things remained calm on the street and the police soon left.
The first main activity on Ezra’s list was a Google X tour, so Bruce and the three boys headed out for that. I stayed behind with Finn to give Ezra a little big kid time. The result is that there aren’t any pictures from X. But the boys came back with pockets of Google candy and I think they had a good time.
Next up was supposed to be lunch at Five Guys, but the boys weren’t hungry yet (see above reference to candy) so they got started on another activity on the list — making tin soldiers. The kids love this activity. What’s not to love? Fire, melting metal, toy soldiers. It’s all good. Bruce set it up in the backyard with the camping stove this time which was great.
After they’d used the soldier molds, Bruce had the idea that they could make coins. So, he brought out the drill, some old wood, and carving tools.
They turned out pretty cool. Here’s Ezra’s.
Because the molten metal was such a hit and the activity was taking longer than we planned, we scrapped the Five Guys idea and ordered some pizza. After a late lunch, Ezra asked if we could do cake. Why not?
Wishes were made, cake was eaten, and the boys got back to their regular programming. Namely, more nerf battles.
It turned out that not everyone wanted to do archery, so instead of going to the range, Bruce set up the target he’d recently made for the backyard.
After shooting at the regular target for a while, they started adding balloons to it and shooting at the balloons. That led to water balloons. Which led to this …
Super fun, totally irresponsible use of water.
As evening came, we got going with Ezra’s choice of dinner — hotdogs roasted over the fire in the backyard. By this time Bruce had left for the airport, and I was too busy managing the chaos to take any pictures. The boys had their dogs and then roasted marshmallows for dessert, and headed back inside for a little more Minecraft time before bed. I was left with a quiet moment to roast a marshmallow over these beautiful coals.
There were a few tense moments over screen time conflicts, but about 9:00 I sent the boys out to the tent. I attempted to take a nice picture of the three of them. Here’s what I got.
Ezra thought it was very funny to be flipping the wrong finger. They stayed up for about an hour and just about the time I was going to go out and tell them to quiet down, they were already quiet.
I think they slept pretty well, although they were up very early. I plied them with pancakes, sausage, and bacon for breakfast.
After everyone left, the boys and I had a relatively quiet day. When I asked Ezra if he had a good time at his party, he said, “It was awesome.” You can’t ask for much more than that.