My big boy turned five last Friday and we threw him a robot-themed birthday party to celebrate on Saturday. This was his first birthday party where we invited guests outside of our family. We had hoped to throw him a party last year, but we were so overwhelmed with a newborn in the house that we never managed to pull it together and Wyatt’s birthday turned out to be kind of lame, so this year I did my very best to make up for it.

After bouncing between Batman, Transformers, Lego and other themes for a few weeks, he finally decided that he wanted to have a robot birthday party. We held the party at a local YMCA so all the activities were taken care of, but I still managed to apply the theme to the invitations, cake, goody bags and favors. After looking around on the internet for some general inspiration this is what I came up with:

Invitations

I did a lot of searching for robot invitations online, but I couldn’t find anything that quite fit what I was envisioning, so I bought some robot art from iStockPhoto and designed my own.  I tried to think of a good robot-y word to use for “When”, but I came up blank. Can you think of something?

Cake

The robot cake was made using this design on the Betty Crocker website. I followed their instructions pretty closely and I was thrilled with how the cake came out. Wyatt picked a yellow cake and cream cheese frosting and I decorated it with M&M’s, some nasty sour patch candy thing (which the kids were crazy for), Twizzlers and chocolate wafer cookies. The cake went over pretty well.

Favors and Goody Bags

Ahhhhh, goody bags.

Is there a parent out there who doesn’t dread bringing home the goody bag from a birthday party? They always seem to be filled with candy and plastic toys that break before we’re even back to our house. But the kids all expect them and the birthday boy wanted to give something to his friends so I needed to come up with something. (Actually, Wyatt has received many lovely party favors through the years. I’m just grumpy about goody bags.)

This is what I ended up with:

I looked high and low for robot themed stuff, but after visiting several party stores, dollar stores and toy stores, I came up empty handed. I finally realized that I’d need to get creative. I decided the big treat in the goody bags would be a bag of “nuts and bolts” (basically, just Chex party mix). If you look around on the web a bit, you’ll find that this is a robot party staple.  I used Cheerios for the “nuts” and straight pretzels for the “bolts” and then I threw in some M&M’s so I wouldn’t be like that mean mom who sends kids home from a birthday party with tofu and broccoli. I put the mix into 4×6 clear bags and then I used my robot art to make toppers that were stapled on to the bags. I also put a glow stick into each bag and a cheap plastic toy — one of those things you blow into that makes a whirrrr noise. Those both seemed kind of robot-y to me. I completely lucked out and found robot place mats in the Dollar Spot at Target a few days before the party. I set the table with those and also put out metallic party horns and let the kids take those home after the party was over. (Though, I forgot to tell people to take them until about half of the kids were already out the door.)

Here’s a photo of a goody bag all put together:

Download Printables

After all the time I took to make the invitations and the bag toppers, I thought I’d share them as a downloadable treat.

Invitations

I stripped the information for our party out and then created invitations for birthdays up to age seven. The dimensions for these invitations are 5.5×4.25 inches. This is a standard card size so you should be able to easily find envelopes to fit. The JPG’s below have two invitations on them. If you’re handy in a graphic editing program, you might be able to futz around with them and get four on a letter sized sheet of paper, but I had better luck just printing two to a page. I also recommend printing these on photo paper if possible because the image looks much sharper and is easier to read.

Invitation for 1st Birthday
Invitation for 2nd Birthday
Invitation for 3rd Birthday
Invitation for 4th Birthday
Invitation for 5th Birthday
Invitation for 6th Birthday
Invitation for 7th Birthday

Toppers

The “Nuts & Bolts” treat bag topper is 4×3 inches. The front has the text on it and the back has four little robots. This download has four toppers on it and it will easily fit onto a letter sized sheet of paper. I recommend you print these on cardstock which you can find in the scrapbook section of any craft store. After you print them and cut them out, you will need to fold each topper in half length-wise. Then you can staple them onto the top of the treat bag.

Nuts and Bolts Treat Bag Topper

The goody bag topper is 5×4 inches with four toppers in the graphic. This will fit perfectly on a letter sized sheet of paper. Like the nuts and bolts topper, you fold these in half and staple them onto the goody bags to close them.

Goodie Bag Topper