Jake's Cowboy Party

Jake has his 3rd birthday coming up on the 13th and we celebrated it this last Saturday with a cowboy birthday. He had originally asked for a gun birthday but you can imagine how chaotic that would have been... a whole bunch of 3 year olds running around shooting each other with play guns, yeah, we had to think of something else so cowboy birthday it was! This is the first he's been excited about things happening which makes it all the more fun for us! He had about 10 of his friends come over and we were lucky enough to have it be a gorgeous, warm, sunny day!
Our birthday boy - he was thrilled about his guns and holster that he got that morning!

Each kid got a cowboy hat when they came along with a bandana made into a bag to put their goodies into.

The cake. Believe it or not, but apparently we picked the worst time to have a cowboy birthday. I could not find ANY-THING cowboy in the stores. I went to Walmart, Target and the dollar store as well as looked in the grocery stores. No one was selling even a gun. So my wonderful mother-in-law found a store in Utah by her house that sold a gun with holsters and mailed them to us. I had to order the hats and bandanas online. I was lucky enough to find invitations at party city as well as the pinata, but that's all they had! Hardly anything for the occasion. And of course when I called grocery stores, none of them had a cowboy themed cake. The only hope I had was Safeway who said they had a digital photo machine that they could use. So I emailed a random cowboy photo, they slapped it on with edible ink and we were equipped with a nice birthday cake! Hooray! Why did I not make my own cake you ask? I don't bake, I don't enjoy it... and that's that!The decorations: as they walked in the door there was a wanted poster of Jake with his frowny face (he had just learned about the frowny/smiley song when we took this picture of it) It worked perfect for the wanted poster. I didn't get pictures of it, but I had a bunch of wanted pictures of the kids that came to the party as decoration.
Some of the kids and moms:

We had 3 stations. My niece and nephews came to help out which was so nice! One was pin the badge on the sheriff and then they got a sheriff's badge as a prize.

We had a target that they shot a nerf gun at and then got a mini water gun as a prize.

We borrowed a bouncy rocking horse from Clint and Kara that they had to lasso, or get the hoola hoop over the horse and they got a yo yo as the prize
Of course, no party would be complete without a pinata... at least on my side of the family. I don't remember a single birthday in my life without a pinata, it's tradition! That's where the Mexican side comes out!
The pinata was solid as a rock so we had to get our niece and nephews to make a dent into it for us. And then, this was a first I've seen in my lifetime. None of the kids ran after the candy... we had to tell them to go get it and still half of them didn't want to get any. In my day, it was every man for themselves and you were lucky if you came out with a handful of candy...

Blowing out the candles. He got lots of fun presents from his friends, he's so excited about all of them! It was a fantastic party!