Lego Birthday Party on A Budget

Handmade invitations: for once I surprised my husband by not using PhotoShop. But our son is old enough to write his guests’ and his own name on each card. The circles are made of foam bought from the dollar store, and I used the tin cap from olive oil bottle to make the shapes.

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The decorations: Lego party favor bags, the punch out pinatas (more on that later)  and presents disguised as decorations. We also got yellow balloons, but forgot to draw faces on those.

 The t-shirts. I found the Lego man stencil from this site. The dollar store has colored t-shirts, although these were mostly L and M youth sizes, and I had to get the 2T and 3T sizes in white for higher prices elsewhere. Three methods for shirt printing were used with varying degrees of success. The original plan was to use heat transfers, and Wal-Mart sells these cheaper than Avery online, about $1+ per sheet; Michael’s was selling another brand for about $10 with only 3 sheets.

Because the celebrant was celebrating his 8th birthday I made two shirts with different designs. One involving the use of freezer paper as stencil and Tulip fabric paint. I got the instructions from here, although I used an 8-Lego man design. Cutting out 8 smaller Lego figures with an exacto knife proved to be tedious and messy. His second shirt turned out better, using the fabric paint to draw the Lego figure and adding a red balloon. To think I only came up with this to cover some mistakes with the heat transfer. But the ones who got this version were pleased that their Lego man had a face. One young guest refused his shirt and later declared it was “stupid” because it didn’t have any eyes or nose, ha-ha-ha.

The “birthday cake”. We have a tradition of not using traditional cakes, and so in previous birthday parties we used cupcakes to form a dinosaur, and brownies and sugar foam for the Angry Birds theme. This year my in-laws made rice krispies to resemble Lego bricks. Because one of our guests is gluten-intolerant we used rice chex. It looks messy but tastes good with semi-sweet baking M&Ms, even if the Betty Crocker cookie icing made it too sweet. Lego candles from Amazon and characters holding the candles completed the colorful effect.

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Rectangle pepperoni pizzas from Caesar’s also looked like Legos.

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The activities. Having a family with seven kids with tons of Legos living next door made our first activity possible. We declared a Lego building contest and our son picked the winner. Or rather, he declared everyone a winner, because he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We also had the toddlers category.

Our punch-out pinatas drew the most praises. When our guests’ ages ranged from 2 to 8 having them take turns to punch a hole to claim their party favors made a lot of sense. It was also easy to make, therefore, cheaper than buying a pinata; and we made three.

Lastly, the party favors that were supposed to go in the punch-out pinatas, are of course little Lego figures. Amazon sells them in packs, and I thought I got a good deal that cost $5 for an entire pack of 20 characters … except they arrived the day after the party, so be sure to order these 3-6 weeks ahead. At least most of our guests live on our street and go to the same school.

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I really went overboard with this party family and friends said, but there were actually other ideas that I didn’t have the time and energy to do anymore.

In the end, everyone had a great time. We didn’t have a single meltdown (although I came close that morning). And the kids look so adorable in their shirts.

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There are more great ideas for a fun Lego party here:

Hello Again

I have been neglecting this site — just not feeling motivated to blog until now. It seems redundant when I have different groups and pages on Facebook about international school teaching, cooking, nutrition, gardening, hiking, and Spokane. I also have a very active fitness and nutrition account on Instagram (which you can see here).

DIY Summer Camp

So I’m just going to share the DIY Summer Camp that we organized with our child’s playmates and neighbors. We could not afford the high cost of day camps so we turned to the Internet, particularly Pinterest, for some ideas. It was great that for the first two weeks of summer our kids were able to go to Vacation Bible School (VBS) in the neighborhood. After that I came up with a theme for each day:

  • Monday was Library Day, because our local library scheduled activities featuring visiting performers like Herman and the Invisible Band, Knights of Veritas, and Star Wars Day.
  • Tuesday was Games Day. We had water balloon and squirt gun fights, slip n’ slide, balloon stomp, kick ball, etc.
  • Wednesday was Parks & Playground Day. We took the kids hiking on the Little Spokane River Painted Rocks Trail a week before a wild fire made it unsafe. We also had an awesome picnic with BBQ at Bear Lake before the burn ban. The kids also have been the Pine River Park (last day of school), Liberty Lake, Riverside State Park Bowl & Pitcher, and Mt. Spokane. Next week we’re going to take them across the border to Idaho’s Coeur D’Alene Beach and Playground.
  • Thursday was Arts & Crafts Day. Who knew pipe cleaners could be lots of fun? The kids made sea animals like fishes, octopi, and star fishes … and you can even “fish” them if you attach a magnet to a fishing pole. Just before the 4th of July they decorated foam sunvisors with their names (using litter glue pens) and stickers. They also made their own marble run out of boxes and popsicle sticks.

Our moms are good at finding free or discounted rates. We’ve taken the kids to the county water park and movies as well ($5 for 9 tickets).

In His Own Words

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We had black ice, slush, and snow everywhere yesterday, but then it rained hard last night and washed everything away.

“The ice grabbed the snow and (they) went away,” he said when he looked out the window this morning.

Gingerbread Pirates & Dino Cookies

Two weeks ago we invited the neighbor’s kids over for a little gingerbread man activity. My husband made them from scratch and the kids got to decorate these, and brought some home for their parents and siblings. I decorated and brought the rest to his school for the staff.

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Last night we made gingerbread cookies for school again. It’s my son’s turn to provide the snacks and bring his favorite Christmas book, which happens to be “The Gingerbread Pirates.” This time we used a store-bought mix, because sadly school policy requires food brought in to be commercially made, possibly for allergy reasons.

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Now we have a bunch of dino cookie cutters, given as a present when our son was into dinosaurs for three years. When I tried to use these on the gingerbread dough he got upset. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say, but to get him to do something else I asked him to draw what he’s trying to say. He grabbed a piece of paper and went to get his crayons. Then he saw the beige crayon and brought it back to me, “it’s peach, it’s peach!” he exclaimed, “dino cookies are peach!” So that resulted in picking up sugar cookie mix during our next grocery run. My son and I prepared them this afternoon, he was high from the success of his gingerbread pirates day. But when I tried to add green sprinkles on them he got upset again. I guess I have to try other ways to stretch that rigid/inflexible nature. “This is brown,” he reminded me as he held up the gingerbread boy cookie cutter, “and no sprinkles on dino cookies.”

Favorite Sources of FREE Children’s Sing-Along Songs and Audiobooks

My interest in children’s music and sing-along songs have been on and off. But luckily a couple of my favorite sites are still around, and one even had a nice makeover.

My son loves to sing — his previous and current teachers said he’s constantly singing or talking to himself (reenacting scenes from his favorite shows) in class — but he hates it when other people sing! We’re not sure if his ears are too sensitive, or maybe other people’s voices interfere with his enjoyment. It is also likely that he’s making his own noises to soothe himself and block out other noises.

Since he has shown a new-found interest in books (we’ve gone from 1 book to 5 books at bedtime in just three months), I have also looked up audio books. When we traveled to spend Thanksgiving with family he showed no interest in his iPad, and was content to listen to the theme music of his favorite TV shows. But the songs are too short, while audio books are not only longer but will also help him learn new words. Robert Munsch’s is a dynamic narrator of his stories, and I used his “Paper Bag Princess” as example for the 6th graders in Multimedia class to emulate when they produce their e-books with their own voice not only narrating the story, but also providing sound effects.

I also downloaded Audiobooks for Android to my smartphone. It offers 2,800 classics for free.