Recycling Old Bike Boxes: Henry's 9th Birthday

The end of September, and Henry's birthday has rolled around again. We've had his last two parties at Scioto Park, but wanted something different this year. Henry initially talked about a game truck or a laser tag truck, but when we priced those out, the laser tag truck came to something like $300 for 12 kids for two hours. Ouch! Too rich for my blood... I figured for less than half of that, I could do something better.

It started with a big order of Nerf guns, darts, and safety glasses from Amazon:

Henry manned the table while his friends filtered in. Each kid got a gun, safety glasses, and team armband to keep:

We had spent the last few Fridays dumpster diving behind the Performance bike shop. Sunday morning, 15 or 16 of those boxes transformed our backyard into a battle zone:

Turns out bike boxes are just the right size for a 3rd grader to use for cover (they're kind of small for me, as I later found out)

We played capture the flag, protect the president, team deathmatch, etc. The kids had a great time.

I'm glad it didn't rain. We didn't have a backup plan in case it rained, except to have 20 kids in the house with Nerf guns. That wouldn't have been pretty.

Henry is all about Nerf these days:

We didn't let him use his big guns--we had to keep the arms race fair for everyone--but later he asked for his next party to be a "bring your own gun" party. Other kids better watch out, our boy is well armed!

Happy #9 Henry!