Ka-chow! Noah turns 3 with Lightning McQueen

Noah is a huge Cars fan.  Lightning McQueen is his favorite character and he has seen the movie thousands of times.  He loves cars in general, really.  So it was a no-brainer that his 3rd birthday theme would be Cars.  This party was fun to plan and came together fairly easy.  Instead of inviting a couple of friends, which I had planned on doing, we realized that most of Garrett's family would be here on July 1st, so we decided to just have cousins for the party guests.  It was fun to have cousins here to help celebrate!  Another reason why it was nice to have family as the guests was because I didn't have to worry about time constraints.  If they wanted to play with toys in between games, it was ok, because I didn't have to squish everything in during the two hour time limit.  That was really nice!

 It was fun to decorate with lots of checkered flags

 This cute roadway was for a game later, but I thought it added a lot to the fun decorations.  

 I found these cool cardboard trucks at oriental trading co.  

And I loved these trophy cups!  I just printed "Piston Cup winner" on a sticky label with McQueen's picture and voila--Piston Cup Trophies!

 Our first activity was decorating licence plates with stickers and crayons.  

 Celeste and Bella working on theirs.

 Noah really likes doing stickers so he had a fun time!

 This was Lydia's finished licence plate.  

 The next game was a car race.  I made them go 2 at a time, which worked out well since there were 6 kids.  I gave each of the kids a wind-up car that I found at Oriental Trading.  I was skeptical about how good they would race since about 95% of the time things fall apart rather quickly from that store.  But I was so impressed with these little cars.  They are awesome and they haven't broken yet.  And they are FAST!  The kids really enjoyed this game.  

The cute little wind-up race cars.

 Noah and Caleb racing with Hannah looking on.

 Love Noah's face!

watching their cars!

 This next game I really thought the kids would like.  But, I was surprised when they didn't really care for it.  I bought inflatable tires and set up cones in the front yard.  They were supposed to roll their tire through the cones and see who could get their tire back the quickest.  They just didn't seem to care.  Noah and Bella didn't even try.  I'm wondering if the heat had anything to do with it.  It was HOT that day.  

 So, Maggie and I raced and yes...she is cheating and carrying hers through the cones.  Can you believe her?

 So, then we went back inside and tossed bean bags into the same inflatable tires.  They liked this one more. I guess because they got to throw things.  :)

 The last game was kind of like Hide and Seek except you were looking for Cars characters hung around the house.  I glued the characters onto different colors so each kid had a different color to collect.  Bella of course was yellow.  

 Celeste, Amelia and Bella looking for the characters.  

After they completed the search, they were awarded with their Piston Cup Trophy's.  Inside were green, yellow and red M&M's.  Yum!

Celeste, Caleb, Hannah, Bella, Paige, Noah and Miss Amelia down front.  Apparently, she doesn't like to wear clothes.  :)

 The kids were hungry by now, so we stopped for some lunch.  We had bbq'd hot dots, homemade macaroni salad, grapes, apples, cheese cubes, and carrot sticks and peppers.  

The kids played for awhile, and then we opened presents.  

 Sitting in his Cars chair, with his Cars T-shirt on...opening mostly...cars and trucks.  He had a great time!

 Love his faces!

Then we had cake and ice cream.  

The cake wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but I was literally out of time.  I had grande plans, but didn't have time to fulfill them. So, I just put 2 9X13 cakes together and made a road.  We put our old beat up Lightning McQueen on (because Noah wouldn't part with any of the newer ones.)  I was just going to have it be just McQueen and Mater, but Maggie printed out the tractors and put them on.  It added a lot I think. 

 The Birthday Boy and his cheesy grin.  

 Baby Luke loved his cake.

These were the goody bags that I put together for the kids.  I put in a matchbox Cars coloring book for the boys and a some other one for the girls, crayons, fruit snacks, some candy, one of the wind up cars from the race and these bean bags that I made.  

That night we all headed back to Jim and Georgia's to hang out and swim.