Jayce has been asking me how many months until his birthday and birthday party ever since we moved to London. Along with has been an insistence that he have a Superhero party.
When I started looking into different options, even briefly contemplating having it at our flat, Chris and I quickly decided to have it at this incredible indoor play area near our flat. In addition to being an indoor play area, it was also one of those, "we do everything" places. They provide the venue and entertainment, the food and drinks, they do the setting up, the cleaning up, and even the invitations. The control freak in me didn't like to relinquish this much control, but it was exactly what we needed. 
The other side of this is, I didn't really want to spend any more money than we already had. We were paying per child for the venue and food, and though we could afford it and it was worth it, I didn't want to spend any more. So I posed myself the challenge to come up with a few ways to infuse "Superhero" into the party without spending any more cash/spending as little as possible. Here's how I did it and a bit of what Mom and Chelsea helped me assemble while they were in town. 
I used card stock that I had on hand for the capes and masks, found the little superhero symbols on some free Valentine printables online, printed those, cut them out, and attached them to the backs of the capes. (There were more suckers for the party, this is just a few of them.) I wrapped up old shoe boxes, punched holes in the top to hold the suckers, and decorated them in Superhero gear.
I decided to wait until after dinner when the cake and ice cream was being served, spread them all out on a tray, and went around the table to give them to the kids. Jayce was so excited to give masks to his friends! He started walking with me to hand one out to each of his friends, but they ended up running over and crowding around to choose their favorites. 
A post about the party itself is still coming, but I had to break it up a bit for the sake of photo and story overload. :)
The weather behaved like a perfect bell curve when Mom and Chelsea were here: starting beautiful and warm, getting warmer each day until mid-trip, when it started dropping off, and by the last day it was downright cold. Okay, it was low 50s, but walking around with the wind kicked up like it was, it felt like the 40s. 
Anyway, we hadn't made it down to the London Bridge so we headed that way, planning to go out for a nice celebratory dinner afterwards to celebrate Chelsea's graduation from college and acceptance into SMUC and to celebrate Mother's Day. 
We got off the train, walked over to the river and started walking down towards the bridge. But we came across this little rock sculpture thing that just begged to be walked on, so we stopped to let the kids run around a bit.
Just behind the sculpture was this little obstacle course sort of thing, 
and a little 40 meter dash station. The meters were marked out along the ground and there was a timer set up on a light pole at the end. 
We assume this was all set up when the Olympics were in town. There was no sort of plaque or anything telling why it was randomly stations between a few buildings, and it seems like a good enough guess, so we're just going to go with it for now. See the gray marble blocks below? They will become important in a minute.
Mom and Jayce were playing around on the logs for a bit and Mom was trying to get him to come on because it was time to go. My wonderful mom, whose agility does not quite match her enthusiasm when playing with her young grandson, tried to jump over or hop onto one of these marble blocks and didn't quite make it. She went down and hit her head on the edge of one of the blocks which immediately started gushing blood.
I called them at about this point in the trip to inform them that we would need to go to a different hospital than the one we had went to, and since it was a bit further away we decided to all meet up, ride over together, and then split up. 
After a solid round of pictures in front of beautiful tulips, we decided to head over to Buckingham Palace. 
Jayce really wanted to climb up on the bottom of the statue for a picture, so we gave it a good effort. 
But it was really slick and he kept slipping off. And so did I when I tried to climb up and help him. So mom held me up while I was trying to hold Jayce up. But it worked, and we got "hands in the air in victory" pictures.
Then a bunch of people walked in front of Chelsea, repeatedly, and she took pictures anyway. So we threw up a U o fL sign in honor of Chris who was not with us because he was working, and jumped back down.
Then we went over to see the guard. He came out and marched across once and then went back to his station. 
Jayce (representing U of L again), was pretty unimpressed, so he decided to get his head stuck in between the spokes. But only for a second.
Hannah was completely unimpressed. I guess she's seen the guards before.
Next we headed back over to the park to get some ice cream for Mom who had been asking about it relentlessly. (No, seriously.) Then we proceeded to have our ice cream in an almost unrealistically idealistic setting.
The trees were FULL of those tiny white flower petals that come just before the leaves. The ground beneath one tree in particular was completely coated with them, and the branches were so low-hanging that we had to duck to get beneath them. It was almost like we were in our own personal green and white floral dome, shaded from the warmest day of the year so far, and overlooking London's Green Park which was buzzing with happy park go-ers. It was amazing. 
But then Hannah stole my melted ice cream cone and somehow flung it all over her face and hair,
and was so distraught that Chelsea had to run away with her to try to distract her from her misery.
Jayce realized that hitting these low hanging branches sent showers of white petals all over the ground and anyone standing underneath them. 
So he charged at them all, branch/sword in hand,
until he had defeated them all.
We wandered around for a bit more, ate dinner, and headed back to the train station. 
Jayce played happily on someone's phone, Mom and I passed Hannah back and forth, and Chelsea slept. It was a full day for all.
