Eli is turning 5 on Wednesday and to celebrate we had a knight party. We went through many different party options through the year (which I think he started talking about just after Christmas), but finally settled on the knight party.

Ser Eli

Everyone got a personalised (hand made) shield and sword. The shields I cut out of 6mm plywood. The swords are a PVC inspection T and some 20mm conduit covered with a piece of pool noodle.

The PVC pipe inside the pool noodle give the sword….well…quite a bit more punch. Luckily we had shields too.

The knights (and the one princess) had to storm the dragon’s castle. First shoot a water balloon with the giant slingshot (which took some engineering to put together – a little finicky to load, but overall a success).

Climb the ladder to scale the wall, then up the tree and over the monkey rope.

From the monkey rope it was down to the rope swing to cross the moat, and then down to the dragon himself (to pop a balloon and start again). A super big thank you to Marguerite who made the dragon head for us.

We had a ring for throwing arrow darts through

There was lots of general sword fighting, with Steven taking on the little knights

And other adults needing to defend themselves

Eli also took some time to settle on his cake, but when Donné suggested that he could cut off the dragon’s head, then he was all in.

Hiding inside the dragon was some dragon treasure

At the end we rounded things up with a few rounds of “jousting” (also known as sword fighting while riding on dads’ shoulders’)

Knight lollies and flaming arrow marshmallows

The Knight Family Drennan’s (who really couldn’t quite all get it together to look at the camera at the same time for this photo).

Everyone had lots of fun, and we definitely enjoyed the party. Thank you to everyone who came, for all the gifts for Eli, and for joining in the fun.