The 90th birthday party and some celebration ideas...

Greetings from The Perch! Well, we are finally back in NC, having returned on Thursday from the festivities in Florida. Below are a few pictures from the week.

Packed and ready to leave home with auto hooked up to motor home...

The party was last Saturday, and went really well. After appetizers and drinks, we served a Honey Baked Ham along with a fried turkey, cooked by my son-in-law, Shawn. Side dishes were made by various members of the family.

Before serving the cake, this is what we did. Remember the tags that I had sent out with the invitations (you can see them here)? Well, I had directed those invited to write down a few memories of time spent with my dad and return them to me. I tied them with ribbons that matched the Legacy Book (you can see it here). I took out the tags and told my dad that we were going to have a little fun with him and play a game in which he was the only contestant. The name of the game was "Just what do people REALLY think about you, and who said WHAT?!"  I read the tags one-by-one, leaving out any names and identifying information, and asked him to guess who wrote the comments on each tag. Now, you have to know my dad to appreciate this. He is as sharp as a tack and can remember every joke that he ever heard since about 1930. Would you believe that out of about 20 tags, he guessed 18!

Here are the tags...



...and here I am reading them to Dad...

The next day I put all the tags in the pockets of the Legacy Book for him.

Here is the cake, which was a delicious

Hazelnut Cream Cake made by the bakery

in Publix (a wonderful grocery store in the

South)...

And the blowing out of the candles...

This is the first time that the complete four generations of our family were together in almost forever, as my brother's whole family came out from Seattle and NY.

The oldest and youngest members of

the family, Dad and my newest grandson,

Jason...



Something that I put together the last week before we left is this little book called "Roaring Twenties". During my quest for party ideas, I came across a website called The People History, website here. The owner of this site has done a wonderful job of amassing a wealth of information on previous decades, and provides all kinds of facts on the fashions, homes, appliances, etc., of each. So, I printed out a bunch of the pages and pasted them into the little booklet shown below. If you click to enlarge you can see what kinds of things you will see on the website. Also, for $1.95 they will customize a summary of the highlights of the year of the person's birth, and personalize the top of it as you wish. They then send it to you in a PDF format for you to print out.  I used this for the first two pages of the book, also shown below.

When I was preparing for this party, I had pinned various ideas to one of my Pinterest boards. I am showing these pictures because there had been a lot of re-pins of the 90th birthday party ideas that I found. Those of you trying to plan a birthday party for a senior know how hard it is to come up with some suitable ideas. It's not like we can use a Star Wars or Miss Kitty theme now, is it? I gave this book to Dad along with the Legacy Book. (Sorry for the bad photography, but I took these in the motor home where the lighting was not great.)

For the part of the book below, I did a search on eBay

under "newspaper 1923", found headlines of the year

in old newspapers that were for sale, copied and pasted them

into a Word document, adjusted the sizes to be similar,

and pasted them into the book. (I hope this was not illegal,

as they were only for this book and I will not profit by this!)

A good time was had by all at the party! To protect the innocent (!!), I did not show photos of all who attended, but we had about 20 people.

Thanks for spending some time with me. Time to go out and do some yard clean-up...nice weather is finally here for a few days!