Hi everyone,
As my craft room is slowly coming along (I got a new Expedit!), I haven't really done anything crafty. We're talking MONTHS, people! I really and truly don't know how I accumulated so much scrapbooking stuff - I try to tell myself that it's because I've been scrapping for almost 15 years and it's just been "collecting"... but seriously, where did I get all of it? Or maybe the question is: where did I store it all???
Anyway, as we wait for the unveil of my new and improved craft room, I thought I would share with you the details of Jonah's 4th birthday party - the first big party we've thrown in the house and the first birthday party he's had at "home".
It was a Super Mario Brothers theme - I thought of this theme a year ago when I considered having his 4th birthday party at Pump-It-Up (get it? Jumping and Super Mario Bros.? I thought I was really creative coming up with that!). But since we bought our home we decided to celebrate here and keep the theme.
Let me just tell you: a Super Mario Bros. themed party is not easy to plan out. A lot of stuff has to be homemade or bought from the internet. Party City doesn't even carry anything (I thought they did!). Planning this party was an adventure, I tell ya!
Here's the invitation I made... I got the idea off of Etsy but didn't want to spend a lot of $$$ when I knew I could come up with my own.

I had a 6.5x7 inch version made and printed to Costco.com and picked them up at the warehouse. $14.99 for 50 cards with envelopes? SCORE!
I spent a few weeks coming up with the menu but had a hard time because of our families wanting to add to it. I really wanted to keep with the Super Mario theme but it's was too hard! How was I going to name "Dinuguan?" (For you non-Filipino folks, I suggest you Google it. *lol*)
Anyway, here's a picture of most of the food and my menu tags:

I knew that Jonah's 4th birthday might be the first he actually remembers so I really wanted to make it special. We had a couple of games in mind. I found the ideas off the internet. The first was Yoshi's Egg Smash:

I got all of the images off of the internet and printed a 16x20 poster of Yoshi at Costco for about $5. I ordered some plain white plastic eggs from Oriental Trading and colored green dots on them with my Copic markers (I wish I took a picture of the eggs before the toss!). My sister and I filled them with tissue paper and one of them also had a gold coin. The kids took turns tossing the eggs and "smashing" them against Yoshi - most of them didn't break on impact, but they had a great time with them! The kid who had the egg with the golden coin won a prize - a Super Mario DVD.
The next game we played was "Pin the Mustache on Mario".

I also had the Mario image enlarged and printed at Costco. The size was perfect for 4 year olds!
Anyway, I had a hard time deciding on what I would use for mustaches. By sheer luck when I was at Party City, I found packs of mustaches in the aisle intended for a fiesta/Cinco De Mayo. Score! They were all self adhesive and they were definitely a HIT!

After the games came time for the cake:

I didn't want to take the time and really decorate a cake. I found these 2" figurines from Amazon and decided that I would just find the best cake I could at Safeway. When I ordered Jonah's cake I decided to go with a Star Trek cake they had and I just omitted the extra Star Trek figurines the cake came with. I thought the cake really looked like "Super Mario Galaxy". Genius, right? :)
I also ordered extra cupcakes for the kids and made the toppers:


Here's the birthday boy and his cake:

Other stuff...
Here is the birthday banner I made:

The font is called "Super Mario Bros." and I got it off of the internet. I used PSE to "color" in the letters and printed it on my home printer.
The favors I had for the kids were treat boxes from Birthday Express:

I filled them with a little snack, some Super Mario coloring pages I printed off of the internet, a box of crayons, and a Super Mario Sticker sheet.

We got these cute candy filled mushrooms from Cost Plus and got the 2 1/4"x 2 1/4" boxes from Oriental Trading. I cut the question marks out with my Cricut and glued them on. The boxes I got were gold - not exactly Super Mario themed so my sister had a bright idea to wrap them with yellow wrapping paper. Inside the boxes were gold chocolate coins.
And for the adults, I wrapped some Hershey Candy bars:

Whew! I'm still so exhausted from planning DS's party and I still have to plan DD's for the end of next month! I'm still working on J's Thank You cards and as soon as I'm done with those (I'll post them), I can concentrate on our next party planning adventure!
Thanks for visiting today! Miss you all!
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