Daddy's 50th Birthday Party

On March 15th, my Daddy turned 50 years old.  My mom, my sister and I decided that we were going to throw him a surprise birthday lunch/party.  My dad is impossible to surprise, so it was a challenge to keep it from him.  He is the kind of person who figures out every Christmas gift before he unwraps it.  We were worried that we were not going to be able to pull it off, but we did!

Pinterest has made my party planning a lot easier! If you look at my boards, you will see that I create a board for every party or event that I plan.  So, when I began planning the party, I went to Pinterest for inspiration.  I didn't want to do the typical "over the hill" 50th birthday party.  Of course, I always start with the invitation and then plan all of the details from there.  I found this invitation that I loved, so I recreated it, and tweaked it to fit my dad more.  The inspiration invitation had a motorcycle on it, but my dad is a truck guy.  He drove an 18 wheeler for about 18 years, and now he sells them, so I knew that I could easily replace the motorcycle with a truck.  Here is the invitation that we went with.

With the important info blurred out... 

So, since we were going with a truck theme, the centerpieces would be trucks with balloons tied to them.  The trucks were easy to find because as it turns out, my nephew is also obsessed with trucks, so he had a lot that we could "borrow" for the party.  He got upset when he saw all of his toys on the table and he wanted to take them all off.  When we told them they were for "Mike" (his favorite person, beside his mama) he was willing to share.

I picked up some 50th birthday balloons from our local party supply store, and I mixed them with solid colored balloons, which had stickers with the 50 logo on the invitation, but the picture in the 0 was different on each balloon.  This definitely added a personal touch to the balloons.

We had a mixture of round tables and rectangle tables.  The rounds had white table cloths with black overlays, and the rectangle tables had black cloths that had strips of yellow duct tape down the middle like a road.

I was also inspired by this pin to do a photo collage in the shape of a 50.  Our church had the perfect place to put it.  I also made a banner that said "Happy 50th Birthday Mike" that matched the invitation and hung it with the photo display.  This was probably one of my favorite details of the party.  It was definitely a conversation starter, and it was interesting to see all of the people looking at the pictures and telling the stories that went along with them. 

I'm in love with my cake lady.  She is our Pastry Chef at work, but I've started getting her to do all of my cakes as well.  I can give her any design, and she always delivers a cake that is awesome. She matched the invitation perfectly! 

Here are some of the other details: 

Wrapped silverware displayed in a dump truck:

Close up of the silverware... of course the wraps matched the invites. 

Buffet table with Banner:

Another view of the buffet table.  The other dump truck had cornbread in it. 

Overall, it was a great day.  I was exhausted at the end of it, but Daddy was totally surprised... well until he came out of church and saw everyone's cars at the activity center, which was only about 30 minutes before the party started.