Mario Birthday Party 2009

We’ve decided we’re doing a Mario Kart party this year for both kids as a combined birthday party. Here is the entire oh-so-simple party plan, thanks to some awesome ideas in the Mario Birthday Party Brainstorm and some brainstorming here as well. I love planning parties that don’t really need a party planner to pull off 🙂 Like this:

1 – Have the kids decorate their ‘carts’ — I’m deciding whether these will be cardboard boxes or whether we’ll have them just bring their bikes, etc. I think cardboard boxes would be more fun and more fair.

2 – Run them around the circuit (maybe the junior high track or perhaps the track around a local pond) for a few races

3 – Go on a coin hunt with bubble gum coins. This was a hit at our last Mario birthday party

4 – Serve mario mushroom cupcakes with a star shaped icecream cake

5 – Bust open a Yoshi Egg Pinata … creating that will be our project for today

And that’s IT! Seriously, the hardest part is going to be making invitations, and I’m bound and determined to make that easy too… perhaps a super-simple question mark printed on a square of goldenrod card stock with the invite info on the back? Maybe we’ll buy them even.

I have seen some really awesome Mario parties where the moms and dads put in oodles of effort and I totally applaud those parents. Maybe one of these years when I’m not working and going to school full time and moving and everything else, I’ll give that a go. But I think this will be the easiest Mario Birthday party ever, and it’ll still be a blast! I’m so excited. I’ll be posting pictures here after we’re all done 🙂

UPDATE: Nothing, and I mean NOTHING turned out as planned. But it was a blast anyway. The road to the park was closed, for starters. So we ended up having our Mario Party here. We had the Yoshi pinata, the mushroom cupcakes, homemade pizza, and a ton of mini games.

My mom, who happens to be one of the best teachers I know, saved the day with some awesome game ideas. In one of them she had the kids take two squares of carpet and stand on one while they jumped to the next. Then they’d turn around and grab the square they’d jumped from and throw it ahead of them. The trick? They had to cross the finish line without getting hit by a balloon.

My favorite game was in reference to Mario and his FLUDD device: We had the kids race pingpong balls relay style, using only squirt bottles full of water to move them. It was a riot.

And yes, we took a -long- nap afterward. I do have lots of pictures, but somehow in the move I seem to be missing my CF card reader. When I find it I’ll load a few up here.