Robot Birthday Party

I've spent snippets of evenings and weekends during the last few weeks getting ready for Soren's 4th birthday party, held last Sunday, and in my mind, a successful fete!

While most of our friends and relatives probably think I'm nuts putting so much time and effort into a kids' birthday party, I assure you all that I really really just enjoy creating these kinds of events.  More than one person has said that I should go into business as a party planner, and I've definitely given it some thought.  Maybe once Jude is a little older and I have more time to devote to such employment.

Rather than having our small house destroyed by a stampede of kids, we opted to have our party at a local community space.  This gave the kiddos plenty of room to spread out and run around, and also came with both and art room and a bounce house that we set up in the larger room.

Bouncing and painting certainly occupied the kids for the majority of the time.  Hopefully parents appreciated the opportunity for their children to burn off all that sugar via jumping.

My mother-in-law made this fabulous robot cake and cupcakes for the party.  It turned out so cool, and you can find out how to make it Betty Crocker (it even includes an instructional video).

Though it was a little tricky finding robot-themed items, I managed to pull it off by making some homemade stuff like the banner (which is a little hard to read here, since it kept saggin in the middle).  You can find my tutorial for a similar banner here.

Using decorative paper and cardstock, I made some cutesy signs like "battery cells" for drinks

"Cheese Ball Bearings", "Nuts and Bolts" and "Computer Chips."

I served the snacks in aluminum tins to give it more of a metal robot look. 

I found the treat bags in the dollar section of either Walmart or Target way back during the back-to-school shopping season.  They're actually reusable (the orange ones) and paper lunch bags.

 

It's great to have a theme way ahead of time so you can scout out supplies months before the event rather than scrambling to find them at the last minute.

I stuffed the goodie bags with some snacks and robot t-shirts that I had screen printed for the kids.

I like that it was something non-junky to include in the bags and that they'd definitely use instead of ending in the trash. You can find my screen printing tutorial for them HERE.

Another fun thing I made was a cardboard robot with a cutout in the head for the kids to pose in. I used boxes, electrical tape, and other stuff we had around the house. Soren enjoyed helping me with this.

I downloaded the Pocketbooth app for the iPhone and had the kids pose, photobooth-style. Fun stuff!

I wanted to take advantage of the art room in the space, as well as my art teacher skills, so for the creative part, I found these cool paint-able ceramic robot banks online (cheap too, under 20 bucks for a dozen) and had the kids paint them. They loved it!

Soren said painting the robot was his favorite part of the party.  That melts my heart.

I bought some special paints for glass and ceramic, which should hold up well on these ceramic banks.

We had the usual birthday fare, pizza, cake and ice cream, and FOUR candles this year.

What a happy happy birthday for my robot boy!

If you'd like to use make your own banner and tags, I used the free Tombots and Homemade Robot fonts. Here are the images I designed for the food tags, which you can right click and save, then mount onto colored paper or cardstock:

Free Printable Bookplate

I designed a cute bird bookplate for some books I have but thought I'd share it with my blog friends. Just right-click and save it, then print it out and put inside your books. This would be nice for labeling school books too.
You can download it here too. Enjoy!