Last Saturday we threw a party for our Dad's 60th birthday! It was a fun, easy party to prepare and we all enjoyed it so much.

We all met at Mom and Dad's house and started things in the early evening.

The most special thing about the party was the people that joined us. My Dad's mom, brother, and sisters and their spouses all came from North Carolina (actually, almost everyone came from NC! We were so thankful they made the drive for this occasion). Michael takes the prize for coming the farthest...he is living in NYC and caught a bus to Virginia!! We had a good crowd of about 20.

I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked, but here are some to give you a good idea of how we celebrated.

Stephen and I gathered as many pictures of Dad from the last 60 years as we could. He printed them in B&W and I mounted them in this shadow box frame in the shape of a six and a zero. I had a lot of fun looking through all the pictures...some good laughs and sweet "awwws" there :)

This doubled as a party decoration and a gift for Dad.

Erin Carroll made this cake for us...perfect! She used the colors from his airplane (we also matched the plates/balloons/etc. to these colors). The design is from the tail of the plane, and she used some delicious marshmallow fondant in addition to the regular icing. There were lots of comments on the cake, as is usual for her cakes!

Stephen blew up some of Dad's old school pictures to use as a decoration above one of the food tables.

Stephen used all of the pictures he had scanned to make a DVD slideshow. We used this to get the party started. After we watched this once or twice through, we began with dinner.

The young girls were really into the slideshow! Cute! In the middle is our cousin's little girl, Hannah. She is 6 and precious...I was so glad that V and K got to spend time with her last weekend.

The rest of us were glued to the pictures, too. It was a fun way to start the party.

I know my Dad was really happy that Granny came up from Lucama to be there!

Chris and Lynn are my Grandma's neighbors and long-time friends from Raleigh. It was nice to get to know them better and party with them.

Michael and our cousin Amy

Sisters! Aunt Julie and Aunt Stella

The cake table with a view of the invitation

The birthday man and his firstborn

We put these chalk decals on the walls around the room for people to write on. In addition to this acrostic, we had one that said, "5 things we love about Larry" and one that said, "5 birthday wishes."

Kate was in and out of Papa's arms the whole night. Of course she wanted to be in on the present-opening!

The main gift for the birthday was this group of envelopes: "60 years of memories." Over the past two months (but actually most people sent theirs in during the last two weeks!), I've been collecting written memories that people have of Dad from the last 60 years. The response was great...he had everyone from family to old friends to employees to fellow battery distributors to send in a note. Lots of them were sent in the mail handwritten, but we had some emails, too. Everyone wrote a specific memory that they have of doing something with Dad or something that he did...it was so much fun putting them all together! It was a great project for me!

I split them up into separate airmail envelopes and numbered each of them, up to 60.

During the party, we passed out all the envelopes to everyone who was there, and we each read them out loud to Dad, one by one, in order. It was a cool experience for us to all do it together. We were able to really celebrate him and his past as a family!

After that, we cut the cake and hung out some more. It was very relaxing and enjoyable.

Thanks for taking the time to look through these pictures from the party! And thanks to everyone who came...it meant so much to us all, especially to Dad.

Happy 60th birthday, Dad!