Angry Bird Party

For my son's 6th birthday we had an Angry Bird party. I had seen some of my friends' posts about Angry Bird parties they did, and thought it would be pretty simple. As with the alien party, I tried to get my boys as involved as much as possible. They sampled sandwiches, helped make the Bomb bird,  and made another poster with drawings of angry birds, and angry bird levels.

A few weeks before the party, I asked for boxes from my local grocery store. We used them to build angry bird towers, complete with bad piggies (I hadn't planned very well how to attach them, especially with the wind, so we only had one). After building the towers, the boys took turns throwing balls at them to knock the tower down.

 

 They especially enjoyed being the angry birds, and knocking the box towers down with their bodies.

 For the cake, I made chocolate cupcakes, and turned them into angry birds using different colours of fondant icing (and dried apricots for some of the mouths). The sling-shot is made out of carrot cake, with homemade apple fruit leather for the sling. I baked the carrot cake in a 9-in x 13-in tin lined with baking paper. After removing the cake from the tin, I cut a slingshot shape from it. I had a lot of fun making this cake, and was quite pleased with how it turned out. I let each boy choose an angry bird to take home, and they loved that.

 

For the rest of the food, I made Matilda sandwiches. I used a round biscuit cutter that fit inside the bread. The filling was either ham or cheese, but you could use any sandwich filling really. I cut triangles out of orange cheese for the beaks. For some of the eyes, I used sliced black olives, and some had halved red grapes. I used julienned dates for the feathers. Although it worked pretty well, the dates didn't go down very well with the party guests. Most of them didn't know what they were. If I make these again, I would either just use scraps of the white bread, or make strips with brown bread for more contrast.

 Another game we played was pin the fuse on Bomb. My boys helped design the bird and the fuses.

We also had a treasure/egg hunt. Each clue was on a piece of paper that formed part of a puzzle. on the other side of the  puzzle was a picture of the locker we hid the treasure box in. I placed the party bags and some kinder eggs in the treasure box. As usual, the treasure hunt was one of the more popular activities.

Alien Party

Several months ago, I had an alien birthday party for my son, and I am finally getting around to posting about it. I don't have a fancy camera, and I am not the most artistic person around, but I found/had some fun ideas I think someone out there might want to use someday.

As my boys get older, I try to involve them as much as possible in the planning of their birthday parties. I don't really care about everything looking perfect. I'd much rather have things that my boys helped to create. My son really likes aliens, and especially loves drawing his own alien creations. So when it came to deciding what his theme would be, it was a no-brainer. We looked through cake decorating books together and found a design he liked. To decorate, my boys drew aliens and planets on a banner of paper, and then we taped black alien eyes to balloons.

For the invitations, I cut out aliens my son had drawn and pasted them to some shiny card with the party information: 4...3..2..1.. Blastoff to x's alien party.

For the food we found a tutorial on how to make alien cupcakes, and then my son helped me make and decorate them.  I also made some green smoothies using this idea for a Toy Story alien milkshake.

I got the idea for the birthday cake from Gorgeous and Gruesome Cakes for Children. I changed the swamp monster into an alien eating an astronaut. The actual cake didn't turn out so well, it was quite dense, but I really liked how it looked.

For the games we did "pin the eye on the alien." My son drew the shape for the alien's body.

The best game of the day was our "Aliens in Underpants" treasure hunt.  When the children first arrived, we had each one decorate his own paper underpants. When they were finished, we hung them on the line. Then when they were busy building spaceships out of junk, I took the underpants, and hid them around the house next to a party bag with another original alien pasted to the front.  When we were ready for the treasure hunt, we announced that the pants had been stolen by aliens, and each child had to find his own underpants.  They loved this game!