Arcade Fire!

 What a fun time! We've been trying to plan a fun birthday party for Ledger ever since his got cancelled two years ago. When the Pandemic hit, it was right before his birthday so he had to settle for a birthday with just his parents. Kinda disappointing for an 8 year old... Then the next year wasn't much better because we still weren't through the worst of it. So, we knew we had a couple bad years to make up for- and boy did we! Diana and I did a little looking around and found out that we could rent out the Allegan Arcade for really cheap. So we called months in advance to reserve it for the Saturday afternoon closest to his birthday. We talked with him about it and he got really excited about the idea! The part that he was most excited about was the fact that he got to invite his entire grade- both classes! We only had 4 or 5 RSVPs leading up to the party, but we were blown away by the actual turnout at the party- there were over 25 kids there! And much to Ledger's delight, they all brought birthday gifts for him!

We got there around 11:30am and quickly put up the decorations and balloons, making the place look as special as possible. The kids arrived around noon and soon after the 10 pizza's we ordered arrived as well. All the games had been changed to unlimited play, so the kids were able to just have a blast playing the different video and pinball games. It was complete chaos, but the fun chaos where everyone is clearly having the time of their lives! We had Diana, myself, Barbara, James, Josh, and Amber as the adults trying to keep some sort of control, as well as a few parents who decided to stick around and enjoy the fun as well. The pizza and juice disappeared quickly- we even went back and got 5 more pizzas! Ledger's favorite teacher, Mrs. Eckwielen, even made a surprise visit to wish Ledge a happy birthday! After about an hour, we gathered everyone together for singing and cake. The kids, at the top of their lungs of course, sang 'Happy Birthday' to Ledger and he blew out the candles on a small cake. We handed out cupcakes for everyone to enjoy while Ledge opened up the amazingly large amount of gifts from his classmates. He was absolutely in his glory, soaking it all up! Then it was back to playing games and being silly. At one point a bunch of kids decided they wanted to play under the pinball games and went into what was dubbed 'Narnia'... Finally, the parents started to show up to pick everyone up after they had blasted through their sugar rushes! We gave out all the helium balloons to kids as they left as a parting gift.

It didn't take long to clean up the place once everyone was gone. They had another party coming in so we had to get out of there right away after 2pm. We had to take a couple trips to the car just to carry all gifts Ledge got! The whole thing was an outrageous success that Ledger will remember forever!

(more pics: 1, 2, 3)