It's only 5 days late anyways. Though of course to him it might as well have been 5 months.
Per request, Calen had a Minecraft party. Which is totally original and creative and no kid in the last two years has had a Minecraft party.
NOT. It's pretty much the thing since every boy (and girl) from ages 6 to 16 plays Minecraft on whatever electronic device they have in their home.
I know nothing about Minecraft (and I'm a self-declared gamer-nerd that plays a lot of popular games on all platforms -- but especially Playstation and Xbox). Luckily, since it's basically the most popular game around right now, Pinterest was completely overflooded with ideas for a Minecraft birthday party so I got a crash course in the game. I didn't want anything completely ridiculous for this party. A cake, some decorations, the end. So I picked through the ten thousand pins of Minecraft parties and chose a few extremely cheap and stupid simple things for Calen's party.
I was not interested in being one of those extravagant out of control birthday party planners. I firmly believe you can make a kid's party "cool" without it costing your mortgage and 3 years of planning. This party seriously cost me less than $50 and I threw it all together in a couple of hours this morning (mostly because when I woke up this morning I had a "OHMYGAWD the party is TODAY!" panic moment and HAD to get it all done in a couple hours before they came home from school).
So, the party. We did it in the garage, because obviously. It's big and spacious and the boys were allowed to be loud and rowdy and make a huge mess and spill their neon green Gatorade without me even batting an eye. Using Pinterest, I made some Minecraft spiders out of balloons and streamers and taped them up on the walls, and also made a gigantic creeper (the Minecraft bad guy thing) out of square plates. I moved Calen's TV into the corner of the garage and set up the Playstation so that they could play...surprise...Minecraft.
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| Gamer hangout |
The main hit with this party is the food. Because Minecraft is a mining/survival/building game, it was super easy to have snack items on the table represent real things in the game. It took me about five minutes on google to find free printable Minecraft labels for the food I picked. So pretzel sticks were "sticks", Cheetos were "torches", grapes were "emeralds", etc. And lime green Gatorade decorated as creepers.
People who know me know that making a super rad cake is my thing for the boys every year. Even if we don't have a party, they get to pick what kind of cake I'll make. This cake was seriously the easiest "cake" I've ever made. Being that Minecraft is "retro" and is very blocky and pixely, I used premade Rice Krispie Treats to basically just stack together to make a Minecraft "world". I used leftover green frosting (from his baseball cake on his actual birthday) for the grass on top of the "grass blocks", leftover red gel frosting for the "lava", leftover white frosting that I colored blue for the "lake", and a free printable Minecraft trees that I taped to toothpicks for the trees on the cake. Then I bought some mini Minecraft figures from Target and put them all over the cake. Done done and done. It took maybe 45 minutes to make, tops. And it turned out way awesome.
Calen invited 3 of his favorite friends and they spent the entire afternoon/evening in the garage, being loud, shooting spiders with Nerf guns, eating, playing Legos and playing Minecraft on the Playstation. And that was that. No stupid party games, no micromanaging from parents (except for one forced photo of them before the creeper fell off the wall), nothing. I planted myself in a chair outside the garage with a beer to "guard the exits" to make sure no kids disappeared, and they entertained themselves.
Easiest at-home party ever.
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