Despicable Day -- Just for Jackson

I started preparing for this Despicable Day several days ago.  I had this in my freezer:

And this on my table:

Yesterday we decided to surprise Jackson a day early and take him to the Living Planet Aquarium.  (Sorry, no pictures since we were both either carrying a baby or wrangling an almost eight-year old.)  Our favorites, hands-down, were the penguins.  We got to watch them eat, swim, dive, and walk around.  If you know my son, you know he LOVES penguins.  In fact, he's mentioned a couple of times lately that he plans to go on an exploration trip to Antarctica "without Mommy, Daddy, or Cole."

Last night Matt and I stayed up a couple extra hours getting the kitchen and living room all ready.  You see, turning EIGHT is a big deal in our house and for our boy.  We wanted him to have a GREAT day.

I had so much fun preparing his birthday. He'd only told me a few days earlier that he wanted a "Despicable Me" cake.  I know that it was inspired by the movie he's been watching every day lately.  I began scouring the internet for ideas.  I had a fantastic cake decor idea in my head, and I found this fantastic tutorial here to make one of Gru's "cousins."  He doesn't look exactly the same, but isn't he cute?!

I ended up painting him with yellow acrylic paint instead of covering him in crepe paper like the tutorial did, but that's because I went to THREE stores, and none of them had crepe paper.

Like I said, I had a fantastic cake idea in mind, but I ended up only doing half of my idea because by the end of the day yesterday, at 11:00  p.m., I decided that the cake toppers I bought were enough, and I knew Jackson would be happy anyway.  Here's how it turned out:

  Jackson picked the colors himself:  Orange for Vector's jumpsuit and blue for the color of the shrink ray.  The cake itself is German chocolate.

When he woke up and came into the kitchen, he looked around and was happy.  Of course, after a few minutes he began to cry and asked, "But Mom, where are my presents?"  I just chuckled and told him that I hadn't wrapped them yet, and that we'd open them later in the day.

 The streamers dangling from the chandelier represent the shrink ray, and we printed off a picture of the moon, and you can see that it's been shrunk.

I made pancakes, just like in the movie, for breakfast, but Jackson chose to have a "V" for Vector and a "G" for Gru.  He also wanted blue pancakes for the shrink ray.

Since we don't have a lot of family very close by, and I'm just not up to doing a "friends" party yet for various reasons, we decided to just celebrate with the four of us. He blew out the candles and opened his presents.

His favorites were new Walkie Talkies from Matt, a globe from Mom, and a fun Interactive United States Map, uh, THING from Grandma and Grandpa.

 I knew Jackson wouldn't have a problem being the only one to break the pinata.  In fact, he had a grand time beating that cousin.  It worked fantastically!  Sorry, again, no pictures.  I was manning the video camera, and I'm too lazy to post it on the blog.

 Happy Birthday, Bud!  So glad you stuck around!