Bakugans... Brawl!!!

Here it is, the long-awaited post about Dyl's Friend Party. Mama mia, what a pain in the butt. I'm glad we only do friend parties every other year. They are extremely expensive, too. It took us about a month to recover from this, financially. Twenty dollar per week grocery budgets, anyone?

I had to do A LOT of research about this whole Bakugan thing. The cartoon is only on once per week, at like six in the morning, so we have only maybe seen one or two episodes. I think kids like Bakugan toys because they open. They are balls, but when you put them against anything metal, they open up into these dragon fighter thingeys. They really are quite cool. There is a whole game you can play with them, similar to Pokemon, but I have yet to find a kid who actually knows how to play it. Most kids collect them, then carry them around, putting them on metal objects to open them up.

I put together several Bakugan-themed games that I either came up with or found ideas for online. We played Bakugan Memory - this one was my idea. Each character in the show has a bakugan. And each bakugan comes from a different world. Each world's bakugans have special powers. One world has bakugans who are really good at controlling wind. Another world has bakugans who control light really well. And on and on. And they use these talents in fighting each other. So I did this memory game, but the kids had to get the character, his bakugan, and his world in order to get a match. It went pretty well. I'm horrible at memory, but there were a couple of kids in this group with kick-butt memory skillz. The Nappy Neighbor kid was sitting by me during this part, and he smelled SO BADLY. I had to breathe in and out of my mouth the whole time. Argh.

Let's see. We played a game where you roll a bakugan and try to get it to roll onto a metal card so that it opens:

Each kid got a certain number of turns. The one with the most times getting bakugans to successfully open when rolling on the card won. I found out the hard way that Bakugans don't roll well on cement. They kept clicking open before hitting the metal, just because of the jaggedness of the concrete. We fixed the problem by getting Dylan's Bakugan playing mat out. Problem solved. Oh, I had little Bakugan-themed prizes for all of these games, too.

We had a somersault race. Like they are bakugans, get it? Because Bakugans roll before they open. I didn't realize how hard and uneven my ground is in my backyard. I think every single kid got hurt doing that one.

We did this thing where you bounce a ball and try to get it to land in one of six buckets:

I had to improvise again. We couldn't get these balls to land in the buckets, so we gave points if they even hit one bucket like on the side or whatever.

We also had a treasure hunt. They went from clue to clue, and in the end, they found The Infinity Core, which was really my big popcorn bowl with party favor bags in it. Those party favor bags were the most expensive part of the party. But they were all Bakugan things. The kids LOVED them.

My friend, Apes, stayed to help, and I was soooo grateful. Her son, Goober, was having a wiggle-a-thon, so she made him run around the yard three times. He totally did it, without complaining:

It was really funny. Dylan would have stopped after like five steps. Goober is an obedient little man.

Ben really wanted to fire up his grill (his mom brought it down last summer, and Ben rigged it up to the gas line in our house a couple of days before this party), so he made burgers on it for the kids to eat.

Then we had present-opening:

Dylan scored some really amazing presents. For which we still need to write thank-you notes. His friend, Noah, had accidentally broken one of Dylan's bakugans a couple of days earlier. He very thoughtfully bought the exact same kind to replace the broken one. It was really sweet.

Then candle-blowing and cake eating:

After everyone stuffed themselves with cake, I kind of announced that the party was over, but everyone was lingering longer. I didn't mind. The parents of the kids who don't live in the neighborhood were mingling, and the neighborhood kids weren't about to stop playing. All of the kids were running around, playing with their Bakugan party favors. I went inside to clean up, then to Mom's to pick up Sadie and Micah (That was such a good decision, not to have them underfoot for this. Thanks a million, Ma). Then I remembered the dang pinata! So we did the pinata, which you can read about here.

Even though I don't like our Nappy Neighbor, he said, in his almost-unintelligible English, before he had to go home, "Dywan, dis was da BEST pawty I have evah, evah been too in my WIFE." And then he ran off.

The Nappy Neighbor is nine. And he still talks like that. I wonder if his parents won't let the school do speech therapy with him or something...

So, though the compliment was difficult to understand, it really made my day. I felt like the party was a huge success.

Thanks for sticking around, Apes, and for all your help with the games. And thanks for sending me your pics.

No more Dylan Friend Parties for two more years. Phew. Sadie gets her first friend party this year, and she informed me that she wants it to be a "diamond party." Whatever that means. Her birthday is very close to my due date, so I'm thinking of doing the party a couple of weeks early. Or a couple of weeks later. We'll see. I'm not looking forward to having Ramen noodles every night for a couple of weeks again, to offset the cost...