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.
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.
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.
Can I just tell you how happy I am that clementines are back in the stores? And they’re delicious too! Yay, clementines!
Ahem…anywho…
On Monday, Wyatt’s snack box had a strawberry, two clementines peeled and segmented (he can’t peel them himself yet) and some honey wheat pretzels.
Tuesday:
Tuesday’s lunch had more clementines, two turkey meatballs that I cup up and threaded onto skewers and a catsup sandwich cut into the shape of a gingerbread man and decorated with food markers. There’s more catsup for dipping the meatballs in the little pink box that’s barely visible under the sandwich dude.
His snack box was really simple — grapes and more pretzel sticks.
Wednesday:
On Wednesday, I sent some ham, grapes, pita crackers, raspberries and strawberries. The ham was cut into strips and then I coiled it up in the baking cup. I love how it ended up looking kind of like a rose.
Snack that day was a half banana, some cranberries and whole wheat cinnamon sugar tortilla strips.
Thursday:
On Thursday we had some awesome leftover Spanish rice that I was going to send in a Thermos, but when I went to get it out and heat it up, Wyatt was very resistant to eating it for lunch. I was a little surprised because he scarfed it down at dinner the night before. There’s not much point in packing a lunch your kid won’t eat though, so I had to scramble to come up with some other stuff. We ended up with another ham rose, pita crackers, clementine wedges, and a few strawberries and raspberries.
His snack was a apple carrot crusher and a box of pretzels, but they were too boring to photograph. Sorry.
Friday:
Friday’s snack was a mix of Cheerios, Rice Chex, and pretzels. It looks like party mix, but it didn’t have the butter and spices on it. I always forget what a great snack cereal is — I’ll be sending more of it now that I’ve been reminded again.
Tuesday I sent sugar snap peas, baked tofu, toasted pita wedges and an apple carrot crusher. The peas are making their first appearance in this lunch. One of Wyatt’s preschool friends loves them and frequently has them in his lunch, so Wyatt asked me to pack some for him. He splits them open and eats the peas from inside, instead of eating them whole, but…you know…baby steps. I’m still very pleased that he wanted to try something new.
Yep! I went there. This is about as close to charaben as I get, folks. I cut the Batman logo out of tofu with a knife. You can see how well it turned out — not very well — but I’m still damn proud of it. Wyatt was only marginally pleased by it and he complained that there weren’t enough points on the bottom of the wings. Oh well. I also sent blueberries and garlic naan (which didn’t get eaten because I didn’t put catsup on it).
Thursday’s lunch was packed in the Jelly Belly bento box. It had a bun, half a banana, deli turkey roll-ups and some blueberries to fill in the spaces. I also sent some Cheetos as a super special treat because this is Wyatt’s last day of preschool.
Yep! You read that right — in just a little over two weeks, my boy is going to be a big kindergartener! He will be in a morning program and will be home in time for lunch, so I won’t be packing him a lunch regularly any more. I expect that I’ll still be making him bento boxes from time to time and posting photos of them, but because of this change the character of my weekly bento posts will also be changing. I have some ideas up my sleeve so stay tuned for those.
No bento post next week though — we’ll be on vacation in San Diego and I’m going to do my best to stay off the computer while I’m there!
Oooh! Bonus lunches this week! The boys and I went on an adventure to a far away playground on Monday, so I packed lunches for us all. Wyatt’s lunch was in the green box, mine was in the pink box and Augie’s was in the blue snack-sized box. They all had pretty similar contents. Wyatt’s had blueberries, tofu and a bun. Augie’s had exactly the same stuff, just cut into smaller pieces. And mine had a tuna salad sandwich on a bun 9it got a little squished) and a side of blueberries.
Tuesday we went back to a preschooler only lunch. It had sliced baked tofu, blueberries and strawberries and a leftover piece of cornbread from Monday’s dinner.
Wednesday saw a lunch of blueberries, some salami slices and another sandwich made from garlic naan and catsup.
Thursday’s lunch was almost identical to Wednesday’s: garlic naan and catsup sandwich (he really likes these, but I’ll admit I’m embarrassed that I give them to him because they just seem gross to me), salami and an extra big helping of berries.
Friday’s lunch was super special because I sent a half cupcake for a treat. He also got some skewered pork chunks and blueberries and a thermos of garlicky buttered noodles (not pictured).
Whew! I’m late with this post! Last week was a busy week for me so I’m way behind on my blogging.
I don’t have a photo for Tuesday’s lunch because I sent garlic butter noodles in a thermos with a side car of blueberries. It was too boring for me to photograph. I just couldn’t do it. So you’ll have to use your imaginations.
Wednesday, I toasted a mini-pita, put a little bit of butter and garlic salt on it and cut it into wedges. I also put blueberries and salami into the box.
Thursday there were more blueberries (I got a gigantic box at Costco), a turkey hot dog, a little container of catsup and a half a hambuger bun.
Friday I made a catsup sandwich with some garlic naan we had leftover from dinner the night before. The catsup sandwiches really gross me out, but it’s harmless and it’s not my lunch, so I put them in his lunch whenever he asks. He also got some strawberries and a few deli ham roll-ups.
Tuesday’s lunch consisted of blueberry mini-bagel (cut in half and stacked in the box) orange chunks, baked tofu, and blueberries.
This lunch was packed in yet another new “bento” box that I picked up a week or so ago at Dollar Tree. They had Strawberry Shortcake ones too. These weren’t marketed as bento boxes, but they’re sized perfectly. The one concern I have about this box is the quality of the plastic. It was made in China and I’m sure it’s chock full o’ BPAs, which we generally try to avoid. You can see that I’m still using it though, so obviously I’m not that concerned.
Wednesday’s lunch had a gigundo strawberry, blueberries, a turkey hot dog, catsup for the hot dog and some cheez-its.
Thursday’s lunch had leftover noodles from dinner the night before tossed with a little butter, some garlic salt and a healthy sprinkle of parmesan cheese.See them up there? Ha, just kidding — they were in the thermos. This side car had some peas, blueberries and strawberries.
You know how some days all your kid wants to eat are beige foods? Well, Friday was one of those days. The best I could do to brighten up the bun, banana, and tofu packed into Wyatt’s lunch was to decorate the bun with food safe markers.
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crafty · food · kid · kindergarten · motherhood · parenting · photo · preschool
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