A Super Awesome Minecraft Birthday!

My baby boy is 6!!! He seems to have got so tall this last year and so grown up. He is losing those last few incorrectly pronounced words. No more calling mayonnaise ‘Mellonaise’ or calling a remote a ‘bemote’. He is growing too fast! Having a baby this year also made him grow up so much more quickly! Where has my baby boy gone! I do love that he is now the best big brother ever!

If you happened to see my post about the Enderman (from Minecraft) costume I made for Halloween then you will probably have guessed that my little man is obsessed with Minecraft. Of course he wanted a Minecraft Birthday! To be fair he had been saying this was the theme since the beginning of the year! I really am not clued up on Minecraft at all so doing a party based on this game meant doing a little research. It soon became apparent that there are no ‘Minecraft packages’ out there. Nothing nice and easy I could just hire and turn up to. Which meant having to do it all myself and boy did I set myself a challenge!

If you haven’t played minecraft before it is a bit like a kids version of the sims…..if the sims had large box heads and had to scavenge for materials to build their houses and kill animals to eat. It is obviously a kid friendly game however but is quite complex when first learning how to play. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything on that game. My little guy had self taught by watching youtube tutorials. Obviously as you can imagine, planning a party based on this game was a little tricky….It didn’t exactly scream out soft play or magician act or any of the usual party themes. I had to create something totally bespoke for it to fit the theme.

The Venue

We hired a big school hall that had woodland paintings on the wall which suited the theme quite well. It also allowed for plenty of space and had a big kitchen we could use to cook food which meant no frantically cooking food the day before/morning of the party. Although it did mean my poor mum and aunty having to act as dinner ladies at the party! Hiring a school hall is great as it is obviously set up for a large amount of children already and they are usually very cheap. The one we hired had a big screen which we played minecraft spoof versions of popular songs.

The Details

I created an ‘inventory’ like on minecraft that had 8 different items on a printed out sheet. Each item represented an activity that would get them something for their bag. The idea was that they would fill a bag throughout the party and then this would be their party bag to take home. Obviously their bag was like their ‘chest’ in minecraft where they stored things they collected. The 8 symbols were the following: building block, slime block, diamond, pig, cake, bow and arrow, fishing rod. colour ring (probably not the official name for it, God knows!).

For the bags I used green flower arrangement bags and cut out black card in the shape of eyes and a mouth to make it look like a creeper face. Each child was given a bag upon arrival and this bag had an inventory inside and a little highlighter pen. I also added some shredded green paper inside and put a few gamer tattoos in to start them off.

The Cake

My mum made the cake. It was definitely up there as one of the best ones she has made for him! Bless my mum absolutely grafting away making that. Each individual pixel (square of icing) cut out and put on by hand! I mean if that isn’t dedication then I don’t know what is. My little man has his grandma wrapped around his finger! ‘Reid, which cake would you like?’. ‘This giant one Grandma, with all of the squares on’. ‘No problem, anything for my little boy’.. She only had to stay up until early hours making it!

The Games

So as mentioned above, they had to do all of the activities on their inventory. I had come up with 8 tasks/things that were related to Minecraft that they had to do/get. They could do them in any order and if there was something they didn’t want to do they could simply add it to the bag and do at home.

The first activity I did was Lego! I bought some cheap ‘Lego’ kits from Poundland that actually contained 2 kits for £1! There were different kits available and I noticed quite a lot of the adults getting stuck in with this one. Even Reid’s Granddad Bobby was sat bulding Lego on his own at one point!

The second activity was digging for diamonds! I bought the gem and space rock excavation kits from Poundland which were £5 each. They contained 8 blocks with gems inside and you had to chip away until you found a gem/tone. This was a messy activity and the dust went everywhere but was actually very popular!

Another activity was ‘knock over the creepers’. For this I just bought 2 super cheap bow and arrows online. I then bought green oasis foam (flower arrangement blocks) and just used some black tape to make a face on some. I arranged these in to creeper shapes. The aim was for the children to knock over the creeper and they would win a lolly for their bag!

Fishing for sweetie cones was another game we did! I spent agesss making the sweetie cones the day before but they were so so easy to do and I just bought the bags online. The cones were filled with million sweets, a bag of movie mix sweets and then some marshmallows. To make the loop I then added some string on to the cones. I got a cheap paddling pool and filled it with ball pool balls and added the sweet cones. I bought some super cheap mops from B&M and took the ends off and used them as the ‘fishing rods’. They had a hook on the end so basically it was ‘hook a duck’ but with sweet cones.

Creating shapes out of ‘slime’ was another activity. I didn’t want anything too messy however so I went with playfoam stuff instead. There was a pack of 8 reduced in B&M to £2, happy days! I then bought some plastic pots to put them in so the kids could take them home. I kept one of the playfoams to make some shapes with and then, took photos and printed them out as examples for on the day.

Colouring in was the last activity in the room they could do during the party. I just googled some printable Minecraft colouring in sheets and put a load of pens/crayons out for them to use. Obviously if anyone didn’t want to colour in they were then welcome to take sheets home.

The last two symbols on the inventory was a slice of cake and a pig. They were the two things we did at the end of the party and were the last two things to go in to their bags. The pig was a pinata so they had to hit the pig and then inside was more sweets and bouncy balls. The cake was given to them just as they were leaving and once they collected their cake they had ticked the last thing off their list and had completed their challenge.

The Extras

The party seemed to work so so well. I had no idea how it would all come together on the day and that is a bit nerve wracking days leading up. It just worked somehow! We got a bouncy castle because I was so worried in case children were bored or didn’t want to do activities. Whilst the bouncy castle worked great as a filler and for kids arriving I was pleased to say it was definitely under used! The fact that it was Minecraft themed though added even more excitement to the room. The lady we hired it from had only just got the Minecraft banners the week leading up to the party! She provided a lot of entertainment for my son’s birthday last year and is brill!

DIY’ers!

We always DIY our parties which is a lot of work and really isn’t for everyone. You only have to read the post about our wedding to know that this is what we do and we like a challenge (we must love to give ourselves more stress than needed). I love trying to give my little man the best party ever and love trying to stretch our budget as far as possible by DIY’ing. I think I go to so much effort because I know one day he won’t want stuff like this.

One day I will probably sit and cry when he says, mummy I just want to go to the Cinema with my friends. I love the Cinema but something tells me that I won’t be invited either. I know the day is coming very soon where he will probably say, mum can you just book this for my party with a few friends. A package party, somewhere already all set up, that we just turn up to. Nothing wrong with a package party of course…I will just be a tad sad when what I do for him is no longer ‘cool’ or something he would appreciate.

What A Party!

This party got the most amazing feedback from parents. You don’t often get feedback from a kids party, you usually get maybe a thank you for the invite, they had a great time. But I had so many of the parents messaging saying that was the best party ever and their child has been raving about it since. It almost made me want to offer this as a package for other people to hire and then I remembered the time and effort and thought, nah, I’m good! But it was worth it just for those comments and most importantly for the smile on my son’s face.