He marches to the beat of his own drum

So Creed's long been obsessed with OK Go music videos so when the topic of birthday party themes came up, it should be no surprise that he embraced the idea of a marching band birthday party.  He's seen this music video approximately 30 thousand times and it does look like a lot of fun.

I love Miroslav Sasek's This Is book series and I've always thought the Guard on the cover of This Is London looks like he could be in a marching band so I redrew it and tried to copy Sasek's font to write "This is a Party"

Since Creed was turning five, we let him invite five friends, and we asked them to wear red, white, and blue.

I didn't do too much to decorate, but I did put up a new birthday themed chalk drawing (I don't know who did this original illustration, but isn't it great?  I found it in a old piano book from the 50's)

And we got lucky when Target had instruments in their dollar section and they were actually really cute!

And of course, no marching band party would be complete without marching band hats.

Then I put up a paper fringe garland and a linen garland that I stamped with an old letterpress printing block of a drummer marching, and called it good.

I love that Creed would rather have donuts than cake so for the second year in a row, we just stacked up his favorite donuts from Costco. The vintage marching band cake decorations were an Etsy score. (If I had a million dollars there were some amazing vintage drum major hats and batons that I would have bought too, but they were thrilled with the plastic hats.) We also had a bunch of fruit "drum sticks" so I didn't feel like I was only feeding them junk.

After the kids arrived we brought in our lawn chairs and set up a little music class.  Each time we gave them a new instrument I'd tell them a silly way to play it (you just loop this triangle over your ear and shake your head . . .) and then the kids would giggle and correct me and we'd practice playing to a simple rhythm.

They were so serious about it all, and it was adorable.

Once they figured it out, Larry put on a great marching band playlist and the parade all over the house began.

And of course, we couldn't leave out Ollie.

I think Creed had a lot of fun.

I can't stress enough how darling his friends are, but try to get a picture of a group of five-year-olds all looking in the same direction and smiling.

Several months later, the "Creed is awesome" garland is still hanging in our kitchen, because he is indeed very awesome.