Wipeout Birthday Party

Everyone knows the show Wipeout, right?  My boys and The Hubby LOVE to watch it every summer.  While thinking about plans for my older boy's birthday party - Wipeout came to mind.  It was a done deal.

Unfortunately, we learned this summer that Wipeout Season 8 had been canceled - the entire family was quite bummed to hear this news!  Wipeout Run is always an option for super die-hard fans - and those willing to take on the challenge! The Bestie is on a team to participate this fall in Southern California - I can't wait to see pictures!

Back to the party - for the past couple of years now, my older boy has really gotten into the party planning process with me.  We started with the cake, he loves watching the contestants on The Big Red Balls so a lot of our ideas stemmed from that, starting with the cake.

For the cake, he chose Betty Crocker's Triple Chocolate Fudge Cake - a steer from his normal red velvet - but he is a HUGE fan of chocolate and he loved every bite.  We stuck with a Classic Vanilla Creamy Home-Style Frosting from Duncan Hines and colored it.  After looking through the choices of Wilton Icing Colors in the pantry, we started with Teal and then added just enough Royal Blue to get the Wipeout Water he wanted.  {I have two boys.  I have several shades of blue icing colors on hand at any given time.}

We used red ping pong balls that were glued to straws, vanilla creme wafers covered with leftover frosting that I tinted a darker blue made the platform, and Crafted by Kiki made the "finish line" #9 sign for  me.  All designed by my son.  He even added the piles of white sprinkles to reflect the mounds of bubbles you see in the Wipeout Water on the show!

For the invitations, we purchased these from M3AndCo on Etsy - then printed and cut them ourselves.

The party was at 11:00 a.m. so decided to serve snacks and lunch.  He wanted to serve Crockpot Chicken Tacos along with chips, salsa, and guacamole.  But for the fun stuff?  We decided to use Pretzel Rods to represent the Wipeout "Sweeper Bars" alongside a platter of Nutella as a "Mud Pit" for dipping.  He confirmed that there would be a spoon in the Nutella to ensure we didn't have any "double dipping".

We also served "Big Red Balls" a.k.a. cherry sour balls.  You'll also see these at the base of the cake!

My son really thought the "Pool Water" was pretty cool at his little brother's Birthday Pool Party earlier this summer - so we did the same only calling it "Wipeout Water" instead.

I did some local shopping and purchased four red 36" balloons from the TomKat Studio Shop - these were awesome! When I had them inflated, I asked for the "hi float" in the balloons and am expecting these to decorate our house for awhile!  These were tied down behind the food and cake table, but because of the window being behind them, the photo doesn't do them justice!  The kids LOVED them while the dog barked at them.

My son designed the obstacle course, drew everything out in a notebook for me, and made the list of supplies we'd need.  Some of this was very make-shift but it worked perfectly!  The contestants first had to maneuver through two adults (which later became other kids!) swinging noodles at them {not shown here}, then step through small intertubes.  Next, hurdle over 3 noodles taped down to buckets - oh, and The Hubby decided to spray them with the hose as they went through this.

Then into the Water Wheel to get across the pool.  The idea was to use it like a hamster wheel - but then we decided to have them dive into it and get across the pool that way as no one was succeeding the other way!

Once on the other side of the yard, they had to cross over a baby pool while being sprayed with water guns and last but not least, leapfrog over the "big red balls" - these awesome 36" red beach balls were the perfect find for me from Beachballs.com.

For the party favors?  That was a slam dunk - red playground balls of course!

Everyone had a great time - my son chose a small trophy for the winner of the competition, and ended up taking home 1st place himself!

Birthday Pool Party

A couple of months before my little one turned 6, I told my boys that we were going to scale back this year and have smaller birthday parties.  They didn't complain so we moved forward with our plan.  I am still able to influence the little one's decisions on birthday parties - this year I suggested a pool party and he was GAME!  With my mom and nephew in town along with two other families (parents included - no life guard needed!) we hosted a fun pool party for his 6th birthday!

While pregnant with my first child, I ran across an image of a pool party birthday cake in a parenting magazine and told myself I would do that someday.  After viewing a few more images for inspiration, I created this cake - complete with a blue Jell-O pool, and of course a used #6 candle.  He is the 2nd child, he gets a lot of hand-me-downs.  He didn't care that the piping wasn't perfect and the white frosting didn't entirely cover the red velvet cake - he LOVED it!

For the invitations, I used some of my stockpile of beach balls (we buy them when they are like 25 cents at the end of the season), blew them up, used a Sharpie to add the details, let dry, deflated, and shipped.  I saw the idea on Oriental Trading - but since I only had a few to make, decided to go big or go home instead of purchasing the smaller version.  Our guests had a lot of fun blowing them up and then sharing the details with their kids!  Although, my mom told my son that she usually stuck the party invitations to her refrigerator....he told her she needed to blow it up and play with it!  :)

When I asked my little one, what he wanted to serve at his party, his first response was "Cocktails! For the adults!" - that was a super proud parenting moment for me.  We did serve a signature cocktail - a Harvey Wallbanger - a bit of a story behind that one - but stay tuned for a separate blog post!

He also asked for chicken nuggets and PB&J - we agreed on chicken nuggets, fruit, and veggies.  We love Chick-fil-A for nugget trays and purchased our fruit tray from them as well.  I also served "beach balls" (aka cheese balls) and "pool noodles" (aka Twizzlers Rainbow Candy Twists).

For the kiddos, we served "pool water" (aka blue Kool-Aid) - this was a complete copy/paste from my friend Gretchen who served this last year at her daughter's birthday party.  Yes, that is her awesome dispenser that we use at our Easter parties.  I told her I was going to fill with Powerade - she convinced me that Kool-Aid was the better choice - she was right.  This entire dispenser was consumed by 8 kids.....OK, over the course of about 7 hours...when you have a small party, overstayers are a guarantee...

Lastly, for the party favors, I purchased these flip-flop straws and attached to a set of three cake pops. Each guest received one beach ball cake pop and two decorated cake pops - they LOVED them! Thanks to  Claire's Cute Cakes for making them - they were a HUGE hit!!!

I purchased those adorable gift tags from Lauren Haddox Design on Etsy.  Easy.

A huge thanks to my mom for assembling the party favors!!!

We had a wonderful time celebrating the little guy's 6th birthday!  I hope you are inspired by some of these ideas!

Minecraft Birthday Party

This year my older son asked for a Minecraft themed birthday party - he was turning 8 and it is quite possibly his favorite game to play – I was in!

We talked about the cake and what he wanted.  I found some cute ideas on Pinterest that I thought we could work on together and really make it our own.  Building a cake with Rice Krispie squares, blue Jell-O squares, and chocolate brownies with green, grass-like frosting seemed like a great idea!  Don't get me wrong – it would make a pretty awesome cake, but apparently it wasn't what he had in mind.

He requested that the cake look JUST like the cake in the Minecraft game – so that’s what I made.  I believe I am starting to outsmart fondant too.  For those of you who have followed for me for a while, you know my history with fondant.  The end result was pretty good I thought - next time I would do it a little differently.  I would take 4 strips of tan fondant to wrap around the cake and then top it with the white fondant.  Then I would cutout the pieces so that the two pieces of fondant lined up in the middle of the cake. It was kind of a pain to frost the bottom half of the cake once the fondant was on the top!  Most importantly though, my boy loved it!

We ordered our invitations from OlivettaDesign – an Etsy store - as well as the “Happy Birthday” cubes to help decorate the cake and food table.  They were perfect!

The party was in the middle of the afternoon and I decided we could serve snacks to the guests instead of a full meal.  We enjoyed pretty kid friendly food including cheese (cubes of course) and crackers, fruit, chips and salsa - complete with a bowl of crazy hot Mrs. Renfro's Ghost Pepper Salsa (OK, that wasn't so kid friendly) - and some veggies with Delicious Dill Mix from the Women's Bean Project.  If you aren't familiar with this organization, it's worth checking out - pretty cool concept and awesome products.

What the birthday boy didn’t know was that I hired a video game truck from Gamez on Wheelz to entertain all of the boys for a couple of hours.  I knew they wouldn’t even be in the house for most of the party, so I tried to sneakily force them to eat upon arrival.   We streamed some Minecraft parody videos to the television as guests arrived and the game truck arrived shortly after the party started.  Needless to say, my son was very surprised when he walked out and saw the truck and couldn’t wait to run inside and tell the others!  

The parents who stuck around decided that this was quite possibly the best way to throw a birthday party.  We were in the comfort of our own home, yet we didn’t have boys running after each other with lightsabers, shields, and swords all over the place – it was perfect!

My son and I worked on what he wanted to give for party favors and decided upon a bag of miniature chocolate chip cookies for each guest.  We attached a Minecraft-looking “Cookies” label from another Etsy store called MinecraftPartySolved.  My son saw a big smile on each party guest as he passed them out. 

 Another successful birthday party in the books!  I’d love to hear your feedback on the party!