We just finished up Jase's 6th birthday party a couple weekends ago and it was fun one, if I do say so myself. All of the kiddos seemed to enjoy it, which made all the work worthwhile. I had such a grand time planning it out with Jase, as always. I haven't seen an Indiana Jones movie in probably 10-15 years easy and Jase has never seen one. He has only seen clips of Lego Indiana Jones mini movies off of YouTube. If it's Lego, then you better bet he loves it!
I started off looking at several birthday parties I found on Pinterest and to be honest I used quite a few of those ideas. I don't have time to reinvent the wheel over here!
I created the invite in Picasa and it was pretty easy. Picasa is free to download and user friendly. Plus, it beats having to pay for personalized invites on Etsy. I printed them to my local Sam's Club on matte photo paper, slipped them in an envelope and I was good to go. FYI- The price to print 1 hour 5x7's at Sam's Club vs. Walmart is half the price.
Also, this year we asked our guests to bring donations to the Boys and Girls Harbor instead of a gift for Jase. I'll do a blog post on how that went in the near future. But here was the insert we included with the invite.
Since the kids would be going on an adventure, I really wanted the kids to have hats like Indiana. I called several Dollar Tree stores since that's where I read other mom's purchased them, but no luck. I stopped in a local 99 cent store (even though certain items are now over a dollar!) and BAM I hit the jackpot!! I snagged enough hats for our adventurers and Jase loved them!
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| Jase helping cut off all the tags |
I also thought it would be awesome if the kids had satchels, but did not have the money to buy each child one (I was preparing for 30 kids!). Cue my mom...she entered the scene! We looked at several patterns and ideas on the internet and I finally found one that was fairly simple, yet cute! We decided to go with burlap for the fabric since it looked nice and rugged. Mom picked up the fabric and we worked on them together a couple of nights to line out all of the kinks.
Mom was a HUGE trooper and absolutely loves her grandson for the amount of man hours she put into these! They turned out great and the kiddos LOVED them! One thing if you're using burlap: it will fray on you and all of the weaving may come undone. So, we ended up hemming all of the straps on both sides and also on the sides of the front flap. This still allowed it to fray just a bit which gave it a worn look, but the hem stopped it from unraveling all the way through. Definitely worth the time!
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| Finished Product |
The cake...it turned out AWESOME!! My best friend did a fabulous job! I had bought a Lego Indiana Jones set off ofeBay and gave it to her to use. And this was a family project as well, because her husband made the ark of the covenant from scratch...it was perfect! Her cakes never cease to amaze me!
And here is the other set-up we had. I kept it pretty simple since we would be doing so many activities with the kids.
Here is food and naming conventions we went with. A few of the ideas I found and the rest we made up on our own.
Pankot Pizza - Domino's pizza
Bullwhip Chips - Individual bags of chips
Villainous Veggies - Veggie tray
Fate of Atlantis Fruit Salad - Strawberries, apples and grapes
Booby Trap Baked Potato Dip - Sour cream, shredded cheddar cheese and bacon bits mixed together and served with Ruffles or Wavy Lays...tastes just like a loaded baked potato!
Mummy Hummy - Hummus with Pita chips
Snake's Blood - Fruit Punch
Lost Ark Lemonade - Lemonade
Fountain of Youth - Water
Secret Spy Sweet Tea - Sweet Tea
As kids started arriving, we turned on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's The Quest for the Crystal Mickey, which is a spin off of Indiana Jones. Jase thought it was a good tie in! :) {And can I tell you that I'm glad he still likes MMCH!} After a few minutes, we captured the adventurers' attention by handing out the hats, satchels and compasses. They all LOVED them!! Shawn gave them a mini lesson on how to use the compass.
Then we told the kids that Indiana Jones left a note for them and read it aloud.
All of the clues were rolled up, taped shut and had the clue number on the outside. We stored them in an old wagon container we had. The birthday boy started us off and read the first clue!
We stacked a couple of 5 gallon buckets for the stand and covered them with large paper garbage sacks. And since this was a one time event, we used one of Jase's trophies as the golden idol. It worked just fine...and it was free!
Since we had 20+ kids, we set up 2 stations so they would move through faster. We printed 4 Lego Indiana Jones bad guys and taped them onto empty water bottles as our targets. I purchased $1 jump ropes from Walmart and took one handle off, doubled the rope up and put both ends of the rope into one handle and tied a knot. {We had fun practicing this inside the house on a chair...you can really whip the jump rope!}
Now this was fun! We printed up a large Lego Mola Ram character and put it in a large poster frame that has a plexi-glass front. Shawn bought three 10 feet sections of PVC pipe at Lowe's for next to nothing and he cut them up into 1 foot sections. We {my sister} then vertically wrapped them in duct tape. We picked out Realtree camo for the boys and a pink cheetah print for the girls. We bought Nerf darts with section cups at the ends and they worked perfect and stuck right to our target! Everyone enjoyed this clue!
Now we headed out front to build our own paper airplanes. And after you had successfully built an airplane, you tried to land it on the landing strip. If you did not make it on the landing strip, then you crashed!
I asked my mom and sister to have this ready to go when we went out front to build and fly our airplanes. They filled clear cups with a couple of drinks of sprite in each one. As the kids came to the back, we tried to have everyone drink at the same time.
If was great watching the kids react to being poisoned!! The day before the party we blew up 30 balloons and in one of the balloons we put this message in it.
Once they found the balloon with the clue in it, they had to figure out what it meant.
The white ram was Shawn's Dodge Ram truck! We had an ice chest in the bed of the truck with Koolaid Gushers in it. The kids loved the urgency of finding the antidote and passing it out to everyone and drinking it. {And a bonus was that I bought each 6 pack for $0.88 at Walmart. They price matched it for me from Food Town!}
Lastly, we had them go through a little Snake Pit obstacle course on our play set. Once they exited the obstacle course, I gave them a puzzle piece, which was a map to the treasure. Shawn did a great job on the map! We cut a brown lunch bag and he drew the map on there. He then put together a puzzle we had at the house from the dollar store (25 pieces) and mod podged the map to the puzzle. After it dried, he used a box cutter to cut out each puzzle piece. I love how it turned out!
One by one, they started putting the puzzle together.
After they finished the puzzle, they figured out where they needed to go and they were on the hunt!!
Using the same image from the invitation, I made each child a field journal with their name on it. I simply created a 4x6 collage picture in Picasa and put the image on each side and typed their name at the top. I printed the pictures out at Walmart, cut them and taped them down to some mini notepads that were on clearance that my sister found for me at Walmart. I also had some individually wrapped Lego minifigures I bought off of eBay {way cheaper than buying them in the store} for the boys and some girly girl items for the girls. All of the kids thoroughly enjoyed the adventure. I know we did putting it all together.
So much fun! Still hard to believe that we have a 6 year old {and a 3 year old and a 10 month old!!!}. Love my babies so much and feel so blessed.
Oh and here is my Pinterest Party Ideas board with several of the Indiana Jones birthday party ideas I found. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of my ideas I found on here. :)
