How to throw a Minecraft Party

Birthday parties have been consuming my life since February.  We had a little family party for my husband and then three days later we celebrated my four year olds birthday.  Two weeks later we had a Toy Story themed party for him with his friends.  I had absolutely no time to recover from that party because three weeks later my oldest turned nine.  I was a little panicked because I usually have a little more time between the two parties and of course, I was stressing myself out, but we managed to get it all done!


 Actual Birthday 

Like I have said before, birthdays are a huge deal in our house.  We take the whole day and dedicate it to the birthday boy.  And this was no exception for my oldest son, Greyson.   We started off the morning with a birthday breakfast.  The boys always get candles in their birthday meals.  And yes, we do sing at every meal!

After breakfast we were off to the mall to play at the soft play.  All of the malls have these huge indoor playgrounds, which are wonderful when it is 100 degrees outside!  We had a friend hanging out with us for the day due to his school closing for two days.  Our area was covered in a blanket of toxic smoke that was burning in a garbage dump 15 miles away.  It was awful!  The boys played for an hour and were a tired, sweaty mess after all that running around.

We decided to get lunch next at Greyson's  favorite restaurant, Sizzler.  All three of my boys just order the salad bar and usually have three full salads by the time they leave.  I had promise them ice cream for dessert, but they ate so much for lunch that I really did not think it was possible for them to eat any more, but they begged and pleaded and how could I say no on his birthday?  The boys all got Blizzards at Dairy queen.

We even were able to visit Egypt on our way out of the mall!  The malls here have huge exhibits all the time and we were lucky enough to see animals from Egypt.  We saw ostrich, Sphinx cats, fennel fox, Nile Crocodile, African bullfrog and tons of fish.

Once Ben got home from work, we had more to celebrate.  Presents, Greyson's favorite dinner, and cute cupcake brownies. (A friend had just given me these really cute birthday cookie cutters and Greyson wanted me to try them out for his special treat.)  We had a wonderful day.  Now it was time to prepare for his big Minecraft party.

Invitations

Greyson lives and breathes Minecraft right now.  His whole day is consumed by it.  If we are talking about specific time period during school, he always says "I could build that on Minecraft."  He loves watching videos about Minecraft...really, anything that has to do with Minecraft and he is hooked.  So, I knew he would be having a Minecraft party.  There are so many great ideas on Pinterest, so it was a little overwhelming when planning this party.  There was just so much to choose from.  The invitations I made were super easy.  Just green construction paper with a cutout of a creeper face on one side and the party details on the other side.

Decorations

I decorated with green, black, and white streamers and balloons.  The one wall was covered with different shade of green and brown construction papers to make it look pixelated.  I downloaded a Minecraft font for the birthday banner and just stuck those onto construction paper.  I made a huge balloon spider and a ghast out of a small box and covered it with white streamers.

I found a site where you would print off different blocks from the game and also a large Steve.  They were a pain to cut out and put together, but I liked what they added to the table. I also found a site that had a whole bunch of food labels for the table.  The food was so easy for this party.  I only had things that could be found in the game.  The menu included watermelon, apples, broccoli as emeralds, carrots, pretzels as sticks, cheeseball as gold, goldfish as fish, and red & chocolate as TNT.

Games & Activities

I wanted the party to recreate the experiences the kids have while they are playing the game, so we set up our own crafting table.  Each child received a green duct tape creeper wristband when they arrived. These were so easy to make and the kids all loved them.  We also passed out cards to all of the boys that had different crafting items on them.  We started out by asking the kids what they would need to make an axe,

After the boys crafted an axe, they got to decorate their own axe.  Now, I must say, I was thinking more along the lines of a cardboard axe, but my husband was not too thrilled with cutting out 12 axes, so he thought he would get thin pieces of wood at the hardware store.  Well, the hardware store did not have thin pieces of wood, only heavy sharp stick.  So, all of the boys got these crazy heavy sharp pick axes to decorate with duct tape.  I did have to give them all a little speech about not swinging them at each other and we never had any problems at all.  (I would recommend foam or cardboard though!)

Next, the boys had to mine for coal in order to get a torch.  We were planning on having a little mine outside, but the weather decided to have a freak rainstorm during the dry season. It also ended up knocking out our power 10 minutes before the party started.  Thankfully, it did end up coming back on as the guests started to arrive.

Then, the boys had to hop across our lava river on (cardboard) stones without touching their feet in the lava. Our river was heavy red wrapping paper and spray painted with a little black paint.   Now, the next idea was one of those ideas that sounded fun at the time, but really I have no idea what I was thinking.  I broke the boys up into teams of four and they all were given red jello squares. The goal was to see what team could stack the highest jello tower, which is really impossible.  The boys loved it, but you should have seen the absolute disaster of jello smeared all over my living room floor.

After our jello project, we headed outside to explode our TNT.  My boys love Coke and mento explosions, and I knew all the kids at the party would love it too. The TNT boxes were just wrapped in red wrapping paper and then I used white streamers to make it look like TNT.  I used the Minecraft font for the letters.  We had 6 mento explosions, and all the boys were a sticky mess.  But our street was full of giggles and it was totally worth it.

Cake

I saw some awesome cake ideas on Pinterest, but I decided to go with the stacked cake to make it look like a Minecraft scene.  I used chocolate cake, rice crispy treats, and blue jello for the cake and added a few print out creeper faces.  I also added Creeper faces to the extra cupcake that I made.  Grey loved his cake!

Goodie Bags

The goodie bags were really easy too.  I just bought green paper bags and cut out black Creeper faces. I added a list of items that the boys were supposed to try and find in their bag on the back of their bag..  The gift bag only had food in it and they were full of items that would be found in the game.

I also made a Creeper t-shirt for Greyson by dying a shirt green and then using fabric paint for the Creeper face. We packed a ton of activities into Greyson's two hour birthday party, and we were all exhausted afterwards.  It was so much fun and I think all of our guests enjoyed themselves.  I hope my big 9 year old enjoyed his special day.

Now, I get to relax for a couple of weeks before the last party of the year.  Lincoln has decided on a Ninja party, so look forward to that in May!


Inspiration

http://www.dadgeekgamer.com/2013/01/minecraft-birthday-party-v10.html?m=1

http://burntapple.com/2013/08/13/minecraft-birthday-party-ideas/

http://thedetifamily.blogspot.com/2012/07/lukes-11th-minecraft-birthday-party.html

http://www.cupcake-stand.com/minecraft-birthday-party

http://scrappysugargirl.blogspot.com/2013/01/minecraft-birthday-party-pt-1.html


My Pinterest page for the Minecraft party:

http://www.pinterest.com/cera82/greyson-s-bday-ideas/