A St. Patty's Day Birthday

Ok.  Do I remember how to do this? It has been. Quite. Awhile!  Apparently I have been missing this here blog, because I keep thinking "Man, I should post that".  Kind of a crazy thought since it has been almost two years since I have posted anything.

But time to come back.  Right?!  So let me come back with something that fits with March coming up soon.

Last year, my son requested a St. Patrick's Day Birthday Party since his birthday is around St. Patty's Day.  We made it a more "family" type of party and had a true blast.  Kids got fun and games and adults got Irish beer.  Good all around!

As you can see in the pic of my son and daughter, we had hats (from Oriental Trading) and beads to wear.

We did a lot of decorating with rainbows.
 

For food, we ordered pizza but then I also made fruit and veggie rainbows.


We had the kids play a couple of games.  We started with "Gold, Gold, Who's Got the Gold?".  You can read the rules of the game HERE.  Another game was to "Shoot the Shamrocks" with nerf guns.  I had to cut out a lot of shamrocks!  We also had them go on a gold coin hunt.  We hid chocolate gold coins throughout our house with numbers on them.  Then each kid was assigned a number and had to find their numbered coins.  Of course they need a bucket to collect their coins, so I spray painted some tin buckets and created a rainbow handle from pipe cleaners.

For a small additional party favor, I saw the idea to make licorice rainbows with Rolo candies as the pot of gold.  I found it on Pinterest, but this is the original source for the idea.

Finally the cake was the part I was most giddy about!  The outer decorations were ok, but the inside of the cake was the best part!!

 

Just look at those colors in the cake!  Just makes me smile whenever I see how pretty it was!

So since it has been almost a two whole years since I was on here, I should probably fill you all in a bit.  During that time we had a big change to our family...we added a kid!  My daughter, Oliann, was born in December of 2012 and is now 14 months old! Amazing how much can change in two years!

So here is my THREE kids (and final!) last summer:

And here is a bit more updated of the little one.  

Well hopefully I won't be such a stranger around here...but hey, I have three kids now...so now promises! Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!

Spongebob and Patrick Cupcakes

Ok, so I totally admit I am a crazy Mom and person in general.  So even though my son was going to be having a big birthday party (Board Game Theme party I have posted about before), I also wanted him to be able to take in cupcakes to school on his actual birthday.  So me being the type to go way too far, made Spongebob and Patrick cupcakes purely for him to take into school.  But man did they turn out cute!

So I did 12 of each character...yup again a lot of different colors and still only 4 bags and no identical tips!  Really need to buy more!  Anyway, I do not free hand anything but the faces.  I print out the images I want to make, cut them out, and then trace around them with a toothpick onto the base frosted cupcake.  I will freely admit that this was really tedious and I probably included way more detail than I should have attempted...I mean I attempted to give Spongebob his collar and tie!  But like I said, I know I am just a wee bit crazy!

Thanks for checking out my (crazy) kind of engineering!

Board Game Theme Party Cake

This is the last of my Board Game Theme Party posts....hope I haven't bored you!  I was just pretty excited about all that went into it and wanted to share every piece.  If you missed the first 3 posts, click the following links to check them out: Board Game Theme Party, Life-Size Candyland, Goodie Bags & Birthday Clue.


So this is the cake that I made for my son's Board Game Theme party.  I tried to incorporate things from the party to tie it together.  So the top of the cake has the Twister board, the pawn shape that I put on their t-shirts, and scrabble tiles (that were on the invitation) that spelled out my son's name.  Then I made the Candyland path around the side of the cake.

This cake made me want to go out and buy my cake decorating bags and identical tips as there was a lot of different colors (7 in case you were curious).  Even though it took awhile because of the switching of colors, I love how it turned out.  To make decorating easier, I wanted to try and do all of one color so I wasn't switching colors the entire time, so I drew the design on the cake with a toothpick so I knew exactly where all of the red went, etc.  


Well I hope that I might have given someone, somewhere some ideas for a Board Game Theme party or whatever.  Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!

Board Game Theme Party: Goodie Bags and Birthday Clue

So I have already covered some of my son's Board Game Theme Party, so if you missed them, mkae sure you check out: Board Game Theme Party and Life-Size Candyland.  I will save the cake as a separate post...not that it was anything crazy...just want to keep cakes to their own posts.  

So for the goodie bags for the kids, I went ultra simple (mainly because my craft stuff was still in boxes!) with just white bags and taping the "Clue" card that had each of their pictures on it...more on that below.  Inside the bag was a travel game from a dollar store, the pawn t-shirts that I made for them (which we put on most of the kids when they arrived), and a bag of "Treats from their Trip through Candyland".  I had ginger snap cookies from the Gingerbread Tree, Candy Canes for the Peppermint Forest, Gumdrops from Gumdrop Mountains, Lollipop from Lollipop Woods, and a chocolate bar from the Chocolate Swamp.  It was a fun way to add treats to the bag and still keep with my Board Game theme.

So at the party we played the Life-Size Candyland game that I created, Twister, and a Birthday version of the game Clue.  All of the kids at the party were the characters, the locations were rooms in my house, and instead of weapons,  we used birthday decorations.  So our story was someone stole party decorations from a room...they had to figure out who, where, and what.  So I created the "detective notebook" like they have in Clue and the individual cards for each character, room, and decoration.  


My plan was for them to play it like the game of Clue...they have to meet up with someone in one of the rooms, make a guess, and see if the other person could prove them wrong with the cards in their hands.  Biggest problem was that with 13 kids, they only got 2 cards each.  That made it very difficult to "prove someone wrong" because they were not very likely to guess what was in the other person's hands.  

The other problem we ran into was that only about 2-3 of the kids had actually played Clue, so the concept of the game was difficult.  So in the end we had the kids all in one room and just had them walk around and look at each other's cards.  Even with our very modified version, the kids seemed to have fun.  


Well that is everything but the cake which I will post a little later.  Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!

Board Game Theme Party: Life-size Candyland

This is the second post for my son's Board Game Theme party.  I totally blame this idea on Pinterest.  See I saw the "pin" of someone creating giant lollipops and repinned it for a future date.  Well it stuck with me and I decided to run with it.  So I created a life-size version of the game Candyland in my basement.  

I taped down sheets of construction paper to create the Candyland path and included all of the special spots, Rainbow Trail, and Gumdrop Path.  Then I tried to decorate each of the different areas of Candyland.  

I created the Gingerbread Tree from a roll of kraft paper and crumpled green tissue paper.  I used the tree on the actual game for reference.  I don't usually think I am good at drawing, but I was pretty pleased how well my tree turned out.  

My parents actually had light-up candy canes for outdoor Christmas decorations, so we borrowed those and stuck them in pots filled with dirt to make the Peppermint Forest.  They were in a perfect spot in the basement because they lit up a darker area.

For the Gumdrop Mountains, I used pots again to create my gumdrops.  I covered them with kraft paper, painted them (my kids helped), and then added a "sugar" sprinkle.  The "sugar" sprinkle was made by taking two styrofoam balls and rubbing them together.  Rubbing the balls together pretty much disintegrates the balls into tiny styrofoam flakes.  So I sprayed the gumdrops with a spray adhesive and then sprinkle the styrofoam flakes over them.  

The lollipops for the Lollipop Woods were created using a rolled up white poster board for the "stick", a balloon, and clear cellophane.  Like I said this was taken from an idea I saw on Pinterest.  We had difficulty getting them to stand up, so we weighted the bottoms with a bag full of pebbles (or sand) and then taping them to the floor.  It worked pretty well!

The peanuts in Peanut Acres on the other hand were a little shaky, but they got the point across.  I taped two balloons together and then wrapped them with crinkled kraft paper. 

The chocolate bars in the Chocolate Swamp were just boxes covered in kraft paper (this stuff can be found at dollar stores!) and painted to look like a chocolate bar.  Then for the finale, I had my Mom whom actually is an artist paint a castle on a large sheet of paper to be our Candy Castle.   

When the kids actually played the game, I ran around and gave them a card from the actual Candyland game so they could move spaces.  The kids had a blast and kept wanting to play it!  The hardest part was knowing by the end of the party that the whole thing would most likely be destroyed...and it was.  We let them go play it while kids finished eating and while waiting for parents to come...yup that was the end of it.  I was kind of sad simply because I wanted to play it too!  

Thanks f0r checking out my kind of engineering!

Board Game Theme Party

UPDATE:  I made the files I used for creating my Board Game Theme Party Invitations available (for a small fee) for download at the following link.  It will include blank versions of the invitation (one with reference to a birthday and one without), Candyland Goodie Bag Tags (seen HERE), and the file I used to make the T-shirts.  I hope this makes it easier to get the files as I am not very good about answering email requests!

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My son recently celebrated his 7th birthday.  We limit the kids to a big party every other year which worked out even more perfectly that they fall on opposite years between my two kids.  Then on the "off" years we either do just a family thing or a couple of friends type of celebration.  Well this year was a "big" party for him.  It took us awhile to come up with a theme, but we finally agreed on making it a Board Game theme...you know like Clue, Sorry, Scrabble, Candyland, etc.  He has always loved board games and our overflowing game closet shows it...in the new house we actually have a single game closet which is exciting, but it still needs shelves so that they aren't stacked all on top of each other!  

So since my entire craft room is still in boxes, I had to make the invitation entirely on the computer, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  I tried to incorporate different game titles and the pawn shapes that would become recurrent during the party.

For some decorations, I made Connect 4 tokens and then had my husband hang them from an empty curtain rod...one benefit to just moving into the house!  It turned out very cute but unfortunately didn't last long.  It was hanging right where the kids all ate and I am pretty sure they helped bring parts of it down!  

I managed to find a picture of every kid coming to the party (you could always ask their parents for it) that I needed for a game I had planned...more on that later...so I decided to make a Guess Who game/decoration.  

The Guess Who boards were simply a blue poster board with the pictures of everyone at the party printed on regular copy paper and taped to the backside of the poster board.  I made two "boards" so it could actually be played like Guess Who.  Not sure any of the kids played it at the actual party, but my son enjoyed it afterwards!

During the party, we had a few games ready to play as everyone arrived.  Then I split the kids into two groups (I had 13 kids total) and one group played a double mat Twister (just put two mats next to each other) and the other group played a life-size Candyland game I created in my basement.  I will have a separate post on that one!  Then when each group finished, we switched.  After a pizza and fruit lunch, we then had the kids play a birthday version of Clue that I created.  Probably have to do a separate post on that one too.

One other special thing I did as part of their goodie bags (you guessed it...a separate post on that one too...if I included everything this post would be super long!), I made them all t-shirts with their own color pawn on it and a saying, "Life is a game.  Enjoy playing it!".  When each kid arrived at the party, we had them put a t-shirt on (well almost all of them did) so that they became a "pawn" in our games.  I always make them get together for a group shot using cake and ice cream as an incentive!  

So I have a few more posts on the subject of this Board Game party, so I hope you stick with me.  Until then, thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!

No Foolin'...It's April 1st

Happy April 1st!  How did it become April already?  And Easter is just next weekend...simply crazy!  I am ignoring the fact that means it is April Fool's Day this year as I am totally not prepared!  For the last couple of years I have tried to make a silly dinner for the family on or aorund April 1st...not sure it has ever fallen on the actual day just cuz' that is how I roll sometimes.  So since I am ill-prepared this year, I thought I would show you what I did a couple years ago.  I did something last year, but I cannot find the picture of it for the life of me...maybe I actually forgot to take a picture of it which would be absolutely crazy for me! 

Anyway, we had fish sticks with ketchup, peas, and a cupcake for dessert...or did we?!  I think we ate in reverse order and had teh cupcakes first.  They did look like cupcakes with pretty pink frosting, but really they were mini meatloafs with pink mashed potatoes on top!  The fish sticks were the vanilla wafer cookies coated in peanut butter and rolled in crushed up corn flakes and the peas were just green Laffy Taffy.  Then the ketchup was some strawberry jam whipped up to make it smoother.  All of the recipes for these can be found at Family Fun.  I will say that my son was a little nervous to eat everything because while it did look like the food it was suppose to look like it was also a little off.  I think the funniest was watching him take a big bite of cupcake and quickly find out it wasn't cupcake at all!


So while I may not make it to have any fun foods this year (although I have always been late in the past...I could still squeeze it in), I hope you enjoyed the look at what I have done.  Thanks for checking out my kind of engineering!