October is THE month for birthdays in my family. My birthday, my sister’s, 3 other first cousins, one of my best friends, my mom-in-law, my oldest son, and SO many more I won’t even mention.
Obviously, birthdays are on my brain at the moment. Planning what to do for birthdays, parties, gifts, etc…
Birthdays are usually pretty fun around our house – for the kids at least! I go all out (well, not ALL out – no $300 bouncy castle for our parties!) to make it a special day for the kiddos.
Usually, the kiddo will pick the theme that they’d like for their party. Then I build the party around that theme. We take weeks to plan it and work on it together. The kids all the attention to detail. I think it makes them feel very special.
We’ve had some fun parties for sure. Here are some examples of themes, and what I did for the party.
Balls
This is a pretty simple one (a good place to start with examples). My youngest son LOVED LOVED LOVED balls – tennis balls, soccer balls, baseballs, whatever. For his 3rd birthday, he got a new soccer ball, but his party was full of all kinds of balls and round things. We had grapes, oranges, melon balls, Tim Bits (like donut holes only BETTER), etc. The cake was round with a baseball on it (I think… some kind of ball, anyway). Balloons were perfect ‘cuz they were already round! We had round confetti on the tables, and my daughter and oldest son both wore t-shirts with some kind of ball on them. His birthday that year was pretty low key because we were all going through the flu, but we did play a bit of ball, too. Simple, but he liked it.
Mad Hatter
For that same son’s 1st birthday, we did a Mad Hatter party (like from Alice in Wonderland). Without giving it away, I’ll just say that “Mad Hatter” was changed to “Mad ______”, in a play on my son’s name – what we call him, anyway. We asked all the guests to come wearing a fun hat of some kind (any hat really). Those kinds of things make for GREAT pictures afterwards, by the way. The cake was in the shape of a top hat, too. 1st birthdays are usually pretty simple anyway. It didn’t take a lot to entertain him!
Ladybugs
My daughter loves ladybugs, so it was natural that she’d want a ladybug birthday at some point. We started by making the invitations together – red and black construction paper! We made a basic ladybug shape out of black, then made 2 wings out of red, pasted black dots on them, put 2 googley eyes on them, wrote the invitation in white gel pen on the black bug shape, then used t-clips to attach the wings to the body, over the text. To read the invitation, you had to open the wings up by swinging them out to the sides. VERY CUTE! We asked everyone to wear red and black. We had red and black balloons, and red and black streamers. Instead of a cake, we had cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes with red icing wings, black piping (icing) for dots, and black licorice antenae. We had a red tablecloth and coloring pages out for the kiddos to color (bugs of all kinds). My mom-in-law wore her shirt with ladybugs on it and got my daughter a brand new little outfit for my daughter. It was so cute!
Super Mario
We don’t own a video game system, but my boys picked up on Super Mario somewhere, and now they have found some Mario games online. My oldest son’s last birthday (just about a year ago!) was a Super Mario party. The invitations had Super Mario on them (I printed them out myself, like I do about 99% of the time). We printed out Mario coloring pages for all the kiddos to sit and color at some point during the party. We also found a few little activities online that we could print off – a little jumping Mario to cut out and color, some mazes and dot-to-dot kinds of things. For decorations, we used primary color streamers and balloons, and we had chocolate coins all over the house, including some hung from the ceiling on fishing line (just like the coins hovering in mid-air in the Mario games). One of the activities was a “Pin-the-moustache on Mario” game, as well as a coin hunt. For the birthday dessert treat, we did ‘mushrooms’ – cupcakes that the kiddos decorated with Smarties (like M&Ms, but Canadian) to look like the polka-dotted mushrooms in Mario World. The whole time the kids were there, too, I had Mario game music playing on my computer – I had found midi files of most of the Mario music online and put it all in a playlist to play over and over. The boys loved it!!
Space
…the final frontier! Two years ago for my son’s birthday we had a space theme. I can’t remember all the details – except for the cake and the decorations. The cake was just a regular rectangular cake with white icing that I used black cake decorating spray on to make it look gray-ish like the moon surface. I used a spoon to ‘imprint’ craters across the surface. We had a little glow-in-the-dark astronaut that I put on the cake with an ice cream cone rocket ship. It looked very cool, and very much like a space scene. All over the dining room we had taped up glow-in-the-dark planets, coments, space ships, and even had some of the hanging down in fishing line.
Shrek
When my youngest son was ‘growing 4’ (turning 4 years old) he wanted a Shrek party. This one was really fun, and we took the mess out of the house to our local fun park. Invites indicated that it was a Shrek party, and we asked that people wear green. The cake I made was probably one of the most fun I have ever done. I did two rectangular cakes for the base. I used a huge sheet cake pan to build the cake on. On one end of the cake were 2 ‘pools’ – I cut circles out of the cake itself, and in one pool I put pistachio pudding and in the other I filled it with green jello. It was like a swamp! One the other end of the cake was Shrek’s ‘hut’, made out of one of the cake circles I cut out, covered in waffle cone parts broken to make the walls and doors and roof. The whole cake was covered in green colored coconut, to look like grass and weeds. There was a Shrek figure standing next to his famous “Keep Out!” sign. And wherever I could find a cool place to put them there were plastic toy bugs all over the thing. I even used pipe cleaners to make it look like some of the flies and dragonflies were ‘flying’ around the cake.
The bugs were a big hit! There wasn’t much decorating to do, since we were in the party room at the fun park. In the goodie bags we gave out to the kiddos, one of the fun things was Green Goo (flubber), totally perfect for an ogre kind of party. Also in the goodie bags were a couple of plastic bugs for everyone. My son got a few green gifts, including his own green measuring tape with a Shrek sticker on the side of it. He still talks about the Shrek cake, and we washed the bugs off when the cake was done and he got to keep them to play with. (I will admit that it’s still kinda freaky finding a 4 inch spider on the boys’ bedroom floor!)
I’ve also done Veggie Tales cakes and parties, Hello Kitty with a Hello Kitty face cake, a Little Bo Peep party with a Barbie Doll princess cake (her dress was the cake) – that party was a summer party so we had “Pin the cotton ball tail on the sheep” and then a water fight outside. We’ve done butterflies with cupcakes made into the shape of butterflies (kind of like these, but with a bit of a different ‘body’ and antennae). There was a Toy Story party complete with a “Woody the Cowboy” cake.
Right now I’m working on a party for this weekend. It’s a Looney Tunes/ Dress-up party. My oldest son, the birthday boy, is going as Marvin the Martian, my youngest son is going to be the Road Runner, and my daughter defaulted to a Princess. I finished their costumes the day before yesterday. They are very cute! I’ll post pics after the party!! We’re going to the Fun Park again, so I don’t need to worry about decorations. I’m just hoping that the Marvin the Martian cake pan I ordered arrives today (that’s a whole OTHER story…).
Like I said, we make a big deal out of birthdays, and run with a theme to make it fun and creative. I find a theme like that makes it easier for me, too. My mom-in-law once said that she was always so impressed with our parties, because I put so much thought and energy into them. She said that she’d do good to get a matching tablecloth and plates, and probably a cake to go with the theme, but not the invites, the decorations, the dressing up, the extra details. She loves our birthday parties and so do we!
So, what do you do for birthdays? How do you celebrate?
Check out more Family Time Fridays here at my blog, and over at Tidbits of Tammy, too!
