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