He had a Lego Movie theme last year, and Star Wars the year before that, so I guess this was a good mix of the two. ;) Definitely two of his most favorite things anyway! First on the agenda, the invitations. Ethan ended up having three different parties (and I wonder why my boys are spoiled?!?) this year, so I had to make several versions of the invite. The first party was with his classmates from school. We had it at a local bowling alley/laser tag venue. The kids loved it and it was super easy for me! I just showed up with cupcakes and favors and that was it. The kids ate pizza, bowled for awhile, played arcade games, then played a game of laser tag. Tons of fun.
His next party was at our house with my family. My niece, Hannah, had just turned 4 a couple weeks before Ethan's birthday, so we had a fun combined party for the two of them. Luckily, they both love Star Wars and legos, so it made for a fun dark side/light side theme. :) I just printed on both sides of the invite. And yes, as you can see, I have entirely too much fun putting the kids' faces on invites (like I did with Noah and the firetruck a couple years ago). Haha! I used their favorite characters and made them each into tiny legos as well. His final party was with Josh's parents the following weekend. We were all partied out by mid-March, and still recovering a bit now. ;)
To decorate the house, I made a custom banner that read "Happy 7th Birthday Ethan" using the same theme from the invites. Ethan and I worked together to create the banner, selecting characters for each letter - i.e., Han Solo for H, Admiral Ackbar for A, etc. You can see all the characters below. I strung the pendants together with black yarn and used black glittery cardstock for the spacers. It worked well and looked great! For Hannah, I made one that said "Hannah is 4!" :)
For the party favors, I lucked out and found huge bubble wands that were red and blue light sabers at the dollar spot at Target. Perfect! I made little tags to tie to the handles. Amos was a big fan of those, so I'll let him model them. ;)
This year, I made simple cupcakes for his party with friends. Half had black wrappers and half had silver. The frosting was decorated with edible spray-on color in silver or black. For his party with my family, I made death star cake pops. I hadn't made cake pops in a looooong time, and they are something I still need to work on. :/ They still tasted great though, so no one seemed to mind their lumpiness. :)
The following week, I went back to cupcakes. I had finally received some molds I ordered, so I used candy melts to make Darth Vader and stormtrooper heads to decorate the cupcakes. Yay sugar!
I made light sabers out of the napkins, forks and spoons again. I had done this for his other Star Wars party as well. I found cute Star Wars plates (simple black with silver writing) at Target, as well as the coordinating tablecloth. Unfortunately, most of the pictures I took didn't turn out great because we had just purchased our new camera and I was apparently having focusing issues. Sigh.
I love a good pun, so for the dinner menu, Ethan and I chose:
- Pizza the HUTT (Jabba the Hutt)
- CHEWIE'S cheese pizza (Chewbacca)
- SITH 'shroom pizza (a sith)
- HAN'S Hawaiian pizza (Han Solo)
- VADER'S veggie pizza (Darth Vader)
- BOBA-que chips (Boba Fett)
- PRINCESS Lays (Princess Leia)
- FALCON fruit (Millenium falcon)
- g-REY-pe sabers (Rey)
- DROIDIKA dip (a droidika)
- DEATH STAR cake pops (the death star)
- JAR JAR drinks (Jar Jar Binks) - drinks were served in mason jars
- Milk in a JAR JAR
- JANGO mango juice (Jango Fett)
- LUKE skywater (Luke Skywalker)
Happy 7th Birthday to our biggest little man!
All items you see above are available for customization and purchase through my Etsy shop. You can also visit my website, or find me on Facebook.
