2 weeks ago my 5th child turned 8.  That’s a significant birthday in our family and calls for a big party.  The point of this post isn’t to show off gorgeous photos. (I’m terrible at photography.)  It’s just to show that a lot of fun can be had with a budget.  The guests talked about this party for days even though it’s not Pinterest worthy.

Brandon couldn’t decide what kind of cake he wanted so I used 2 boxes of cake mix, 1 each of chocolate and white for the cupcakes.  I dropped both kinds of batter into each cup and swirled it a bit with a tongue depressor.  The leftover batter went into a loaf pan.  

I used Dollar Tree cupcake liners and flags.  We decorated them with chocolate melts (from Hobby Lobby) done in these lego molds.  I still have plenty of melts leftover for Christmas baking.

Regular sized marshmallows cut in half with scissors were the perfect size for lego bumps on top of the loaf pan cake.  Then I microwaved canned red frosting and poured it over the top for a smooth looking frosting.  It didn’t turn out as pretty as the tutorial, but it was really tasty. My Mom had the lego shaped birthday candles in her stash.

We bought a food coloring pen from Hobby Lobby (with a 40% off coupon) to draw the faces on these lego head marshmallow pops. I used this video for instructions:

The pen kept getting junky and didn’t want to write smoothly.   We were going to use the same pens on the cake plates (yellow square plates from dollar tree) to turn them into lego faces.   It just beaded up and wiped off.  Then we noticed that our Sharpies were labeled non-toxic.  We used them on the plates instead of the food coloring.  It looked really good.  I was afraid some of it would come off on the ice cream after it melted into the plate.  It didn’t.

We decorated with a package of yellow balloons and a Dollar Tree Balloon marker–those work really well and don’t smear. Dollar Tree sells packages of single color balloons 15 for $1.  Wal-mart has much better quality balloons 12 for $.97.  The boys made vases out of legos to hide the floral foam we stuck the balloon picks into.  I purchased these balloon picks to save a bundle on helium.  They are reusable and can be cut into scissors to whatever length you need. We now have a lifetime supply.

I set up the table with yellow (Dollar Tree) cups decorated with lego faces and filled with crayons, and printable mini-fig pages.  The box in the middle holds a pile of legos waiting for the next game.

As the kids came in they decorated their page while they waited for the other guests to arrive.  Then we hung them on the wall with painter’s tape.

To set up our next game, we had bowls full of random lego pieces.  We dumped the crayons out of the yellow cups back into our crayon box and gave each guest a straw.  They had 30 seconds to see how many lego pieces they could move from their bowl to their cup with just their straw and breath.  We played several rounds.

Time to get the partiers up and moving.  I passed out a blank sheet of paper and had them number it from 1-13.  Earlier that day, Mom and I hid 13 paper lego men around the house.  (We used this template)

Each man had a word or two written on him. The kids had to find the men, write down the word and leave him there for someone else to find.

When they were done they unscrambled the words to find the scripture:  “This is the Day that the Lord has made.  I will rejoice and be glad in it.”  It was harder for them than we thought it would be.  Next time we’d number the men so they didn’t have to unscramble.

After that we played “Create That.”  We unzipped the big box of legos in the center of the table and then gave them a couple of minutes to build their interpretation of:  a duck, a car, a plane, a spaceship, a robot, and a boat.  At the end of each time limit we showed each person’s creation, said something encouraging and took a picture of him with it (on my mom’s camera.)

Then it was time for cake and ice cream.

And then presents

Then we handed each guest his own gift, wrapped in a Dollar Tree gift bag (3 for $1) with cardstock circles glued on to make it look like a lego.  

I printed the circles on the computer so I didn’t have to trace a template hundreds of time.  It went pretty quickly.

Each bag had a small 3 in 1 lego kit and a small bag of lego shaped candy.  I just put it in snack sized baggies without a fancy label or anything.  The kids loved it anyway. They spread out and built their lego kit while waiting for the parents to come.

There were a few times the kids got crazy, trying to sit on the table or running across the back of the furniture, but for the most part it went really smoothly.   Here’s the breakdown of our budget–the printing costs on the invitations included shipping and invites for his brother’s party two weeks later.  I made up a .jpg and had it printed as a photo at Wal-mart.com.  Then we mailed them in photo envelopes.  It was easy and they were very expensive looking.

The most expensive part of the party was the lego set party favors.  We ordered them directly from lego.com.  At the time they had the best price between Target, Amazon, and Ebay.

This is day 28 of our series 31 Days of Kids and Money

There are strong feelings on both sides of the issue of whether kids should have cell phones or not.  At this point only our oldest has a true cellphone.  She’s had it since her 13th birthday (almost 3 years ago.)

At the time all the kids were going to school together and were in the musical staying after school for a different length of time each day.  We found ourselves often wishing that they were easier to get ahold of.  For her big birthday gift, we bought her the cheapest phone we could find and added her to our monthly bill for $5 a month.  Life was instantly better for us.   The best part was the texting.  All of a sudden the teenage awkwardness between us was gone and we could communicate.  She texted me from her friend’s house just to say, “I love you.”  And I dropped her notes throughout the day just to say, “God made you special and I’m glad you’re in our family.”

Now that she’s older we realized it would be handy for her to have a smartphone where we could share the family calendar and she could access Facebook messages from her choir and youth group.  A friend told us about Swappa, a reliable website for buying used phones.  The phones are guaranteed to work and to not be stolen. She saved up her money from mowing lawns and babysitting and bought the exact same phone I have for 50% less.  We didn’t activate her 4G network with our cellphone company (we use T-mobile because they are the best value for our area) but she can use those features anywhere there’s wifi: home, school, most restaurants and her friends’ houses.

The other kids have been eyeing Heidi’s phone since the day she got it.  It was easy to tell them no when they were little, but they are getting older and going in different directions.  We decided it would be nice to communicate with all the teens when they are working or at school activities and need rides. (Plus it’s a motivating thing to take away if they’re naughty, lol.)

When Heather and Caleb started their businesses and saved up their money to buy an ipod, we looked into cheap ways to get them phone access.  Turns out there’s a magic jack app for iPods.  iPods are about $100 less than iPhones, but can be turned into phones with wifi access with the Magic Jack app.  The app itself is free, and it only costs $15 a YEAR to get them their own phone number with unlimited calling and texting capabilities.  We went that route for those two kiddoes.

We looked at other options such as prepaid cell phones, but since the kids usually aren’t places where there isn’t wifi the Magic Jack was the best option for us.  There’s one more option, Ting, that I haven’t tried yet. My friend Kristen from Frugal Girl says it’s great.  It’s might be a way for you to turn your entire family phone bill into $21 a month.

What do you think about kids and cellphones?  Do you know of another way to save?

This is Day 22 of our series 31 Days of Kids and Money

I’ve only heard of a handful of kids who were excited to practice for their music lessons, and I’m not completely sure the stories were true.  When I was a music teacher my philosophy was simple.  If you didn’t practice, come anyway!  Likely you don’t remember what to practice after a week off and I’ll help you get started again.  I figured the one practice session a week with me was better than nothing.

At some point, however, a habit of never practicing really slows progress. I got tired of paying for lessons to hear my kids sound the same week in and week out.  And our music teachers didn’t all share my philosophy.  Often we spent half of the 30 minute lesson listening to a lecture on the importance of practice–and NOBODY wants to pay for that.

Music is important to me.  So important that I didn’t give my kids a choice of studying music, just like I wouldn’t let them opt out of math. We couldn’t afford lessons so when it was time to start, I took on a paper route to make music possible.  When I became too pregnant to deliver papers safely in icy weather, I started selling Mary Kay instead.  Then Darren lost his job, and we immediately suspended the lessons. Our teacher kindly offered to continue  in trade for my teaching his wife to sew.  I throw that out there just to say that there are ways to have music lessons even if your budget is tight. (I once had a voice student who paid in raw milk = awesome!)

Anyhoo, I finally got so tired of fighting the kids to practice that I announced they were paying for their own lessons.  Each instrument cost $60 a month and the 2 oldest study 2 instruments @ $120 a month.  My kids don’t make that kind of money, and if they did I’d rather them put it in a ROTH.

So, I offered to pay them $3 for a GOOD practice session.  I did not allow them to skip a lesson for not practicing and if they didn’t earn enough to pay for the lesson by practicing they had to come up with the money another way.   It worked.

That was over a year ago and now that we’ve been using this method for awhile, I’ve got some tips for you.  Make sure to get enough single bills at the beginning of the month so you can pay the kids as soon as they practice. It reinforces the behavior better if they get the immediate reward.  It feels weird to go to the bank and get that many ones. If it bothers you, you can trade the kids their ones for bigger bills on the way to the lesson, then use the same $1 bills every week.

I use a clipboard system to help the kids pay themselves when they practice.  Original post here. My biggest failure is forgetting to stock it each week :(.  That can make the whole system go bust.  We have our clipboards hung on the second floor outside their rooms and it would be better for me if they were some place I see all the time.  Out of sight, out of mind.  If you decide to try it, adjust the system to work for you.

There will come a time, when your child has to pay out of his own pocket. He will be sad.  You should be sad too.  Say things like, “Bummer, I’m so sorry this happened.” Look genuinely sad.  It will be hard to look sad, because this is the BEST thing that could be happening for the good of your child. Try to manage it anyway.

If they don’t have money, you can say, “I don’t know what you are going to do.”  Do not give him answers.  Do not bail him out. If he offers to work for the money, accept the offer. Make the job difficult enough that practice would have been better.   If they will be short with money going to the lesson, please (secretly) call the teacher ahead and ask for his help in making your child responsible.  You might offer to slip him the money (and possibly an extra tip) if he will make the child work the debt off.  It will only happen once (or twice if your child needs to test the limits a few times to feel secure.)

This is day 13 in our series 31 Days of Kids and Money