Episode 18: Misty Island Party, here we go! (Here we go!)

The Little Man turned three years old on the 11th! The Saturday before his actual birthday, we had a party with all of our friends from the neighborhood, as well as some family that lives nearby.

This year, since LM is obsessed with Thomas and Friends in general, and was recently (about 3 months ago)obsessed with the movie Misty Island Rescue in particular, we decided to have a Misty Island birthday party!


For those of you who haven't seen the movie, first of all, you are missing a cinematic treat! Secondly, the basic premise is that Thomas' raft comes loose from the boat that is towing him and he gets temporarily lost at sea, landing finally on a mysterious place called Misty Island. On the island are some engines (the Logging Locos) who are unlike any engines that Thomas knows. Thomas experiences the fun and strange things on Misty Island, including a tunnel made out of a hollow log, the very wibbly-wobbly Shake Shake Bridge, and some funny log loaders, Hee Haw and Ol' Wheezy, who aren't very helpful if you don't know what you're doing. He finally accepts help from the Logging Locos, and they end up taking a tunnel back to the Island of Sodor. While in the tunnel, they need to be rescued by Whiff and Percy, but they all make it home OK in the end.

So, we decided that it would be fun to recreate some of the Little Man's favorite elements of the movie, the Tree Tunnel and the Shake Shake Bridge. And, I wanted to use Hee Haw as the inspiration for a game (but, a 3-year-old game, where everyone wins). 

The more the Big Man thought about it, the more he wanted to recreate the story of the movie with an obstacle course in the backyard. We could do a simple ocean maze, then through the Tree Tunnel, over the Shake Shake Bridge, play Hee Haw and throw your logs into the freight cars, then through another tunnel to the Island of Sodor!

Of course, the one day of rain in a two-week period surrounding the party was party night. The weather even mocked me by being gorgeous all afternoon, then raining about an hour before party time. A change of venue was necessary, so we moved the obstacle course to the garage! Our planned streamer maze became blue painter's tape on the floor, and the Big Man taped out the rest of the course with masking tape.

We borrowed two collapsible kids tunnels from two of our neighbors. For the Tree Tunnel, we purchased a brown twin flat sheet to cover the tunnel. We folded the sheet longways like an accordion, and spray painted ridges black. We let the paint dry, then accordion-folded it again, and painted the new ridges a khaki color. Here's the finished product:

(I decided to make a blog post about this after the party was over, so I didn't take any in-process pictures of the crafts.)

The Big Man built the Shake Shake Bridge out of 2 large planks and some scrap lumber. He attached two rectangular scraps to the ends of the large planks, one to each plank, then attached the planks in the middle, all with hinges that were slightly offset. Then, he attached the uneven pieces of scrap lumber to the bottoms of the large planks, so the bridge would wibble and wobble when walked on! Here's how that looked:

For the Hee Haw game, we made freight cars out of empty boxes, and logs out of paper towel rolls. We glued and tied 6 logs into each bundle, then tied on a yarn handle to use to throw them into the freight cars. My good friend and her sister helped to paint the freight cars, and are responsible for all of the fancy paintwork:

You'll notice our spiffy signs, Big Man burned the words into several extra log pieces that we happened to have with a sottering iron. Awesome!

We borrowed another idea from a neighbor and made mini-cupcakes for the party (dairy, soy, and egg-free, of course). I found this neat presentation on Pinterest, and decided to make our own cupcake train! I used graham crackers for the cars, with mini oreos for wheels and wafer cookies for axles. It looked really cool and lasted some of the night (a few cars started breaking about halfway through the party):

For party favors, we got engineer hats from Target, and ordered train whistles and bandanas from Amazon.com. I also found these plastic cups in the bargain section at Target, 2 for $1. I filled each one with some Smarties and Dum-Dum lollipops (all allergy-safe treats!) and wrapped them in clear treat bags.

Happy 3rd birthday, Little Man!!