We were able to have Nate’s rescheduled birthday party last Thursday, and it went amazingly well. We decided after having a friend party for the first time last year, that smaller is better. Last year’s party was fun and fine, but it was a LOT of kids. This year we went with inviting 3 friends, and it was perfect.
I just want to start out by saying that Pinterest is an amazing resource. Most all of what I planned for Nate’s Lego birthday party was something I found via Pinterest or was sparked by an idea I found there. Love that place!
One of our games was a Lego memory game. I used foam board. As difficult as this stuff is to cut, I definitely am hanging onto all those circles in case Nate ever requests another Lego themed party. On the back side of each circle I simple drew a 4 or 8 dotted Lego brick in a variety of colors. If I had hunted down Lego stickers, that would have saved some time, but I was going for simple.
I knew Brad would think I was nuts, but I talked him into helping me bring the train table up from the basement where the kids normally play with it. It turned out to be a perfect home base for all of our activities. For this game, each kid had a cup of random Lego pieces. The goal is to use up all the Lego pieces in your cup first. You get to roll the dice and put that many pieces on the shared board with each turn. This game went really well. They all loved having their turn to add to the building. In the end they decided it was a jail.
For our Lego man hunt, I had 14 blue Lego men. I put a square on 7 of them and a triangle on the other 7. The kids were divided into 2 teams and the Lego men were hidden around our main floor. Most of them were hidden in such a way that it was hard to tell if it was a square or triangle man. If you found one that turned out to be the wrong shape you had to quietly put it back so the other team didn’t know. In the end there was one of each that they had trouble finding and needed hints for.
I picked up a small Lego set (found in check out lanes at Target) for each kid. They each got to open and build their car so that we could have races with them. This was one point where I was glad for the number of kids being small. Nate LOVES Lego building and rarely asks for help even on the larger sets. Not every kid must spend all their free time playing with Lego sets though because Brad and I ended up helping out with the building of a couple of the cars. I also found a Lego Friends set that was a purple and white little car that Jilly and I had built earlier in the day so she could participate in the races. We did an official race, using the green board from the train table, but they were way more interested in their unofficial races. (We differentiated their identical cars with a small Lego piece of different colors so we would know which car belonged to which kid.)
While they ate pizza, I taped all but one of the green circles from our Lego memory game to the large foam board. I had also cut out 5 additional circles and labeled them 1-5. We played a Lego version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey trying to get their circle to land where the missing peg was.
And, yes, my need to make sure everything was planned out, had a written out plan of how we would do things.
Nate was super excited about his Lego shaped candles I happened to run across at Target.
And just because she’s cute:
In the end, each boy got to take home a Lego man shirt like I had made for Nate and Jilly (Jilly’s didn’t make it in any of the pictures, but is purple with a yellow Lego person that has a bow on it’s head – she loves it!) and the car they had built.
I had a ton of fun with this party, from the planning to the hosting of it, it was a lot of fun. We’ll see if he wants another one at some point . . .
