The Minion Birthday party

 Hello, everybody! I have a husband again and I couldn't be happier! I mentioned before that he was gone for a while--he left on August 6 for a school and didn't come home until September 18. Oof, that was a rough one; really difficult on me physically, mentally and emotionally. SO glad to leave it behind. I feel 500% better in every way now that he is back again.

Porter turned 4 on September 17 and we decided to let him have a 'friend' party for the first time this year. Of course we had to to wait until Daddy came home to help us celebrate, and after throwing Maren's LEGO Friends party back in March solo (which I have just now realized that I never blogged), I was more than happy to wait for reinforcements.

I talked Porter into having a Minion party. He did insist on a Spiderman cake, and I gave in on that one because, let's be honest--the Minion thing was kind of all about me. I found some really great printable resources through Pinterest that made the party really easy to put together.

For party favors I made Minion Twinkies using this free printable, which was originally designed to go around push-up pops but happens to fit perfectly around Twinkies! I will recommend that if you make these, you buy the Sara Lee or Little Debbie versions though, because they come in clear wrappers whereas the Twinkies have Hostess printed in red all over the wrapping and that annoyed me. I used the free printable from here to make the little labels to transform tiny squirt guns into Vector's Squid Launchers. Because my guns were smaller I had to closely trim the labels and then I ran them through my Xyron sticker maker to turn them into labels. The favors also included a few Minion bandages (Wal-Mart), and some little candies and Minion tattoos from Party City. I packaged them all up in large cello bags (Dollar Tree) and tied them with yellow ribbons.

I found this fantastic printable download for Minion goggles on Etsy and it was absolutely worth the $2.99! It gives you three different sizes of goggles and mouths. For my Minion balloons I used the largest size of goggles printed onto full-sheet label paper (Wal-Mart) and cut them out and just adhered them onto the balloons.

I also used the printable goggles for our Pin the Goggles on the Minion game, though I forgot to take any photos of them. I printed those onto regular paper and just cut them out and put tape on the back--no point wasting the sticker paper for this task. For the picture I free-handed the Minion and Maren helped me color him.

And the third use for the printable goggle download was to make the faces on the bottles for our Minion bowling game! I used the smallest size goggles and I did print these on sticker paper. I used 1 liter bottles of clear flavored water, then wrapped a piece of yellow cardstock around the top and a strip of blue around the bottom. The sticker paper goggles and mouths were easy to adhere and the bottles cracked me up! We set them up and let the kids roll a basketball at them.

There is also a free printable available to make your own Minion goggles available here. I printed these out on white cardstock and then cut and assembled them. I ended up adding a piece of elastic string to the back, attached to each earpiece, because they wouldn't stay on the kids' heads with just the cardstock. I forgot to get any photos of those, darnit! Between the goggles for the kids, the ones on the balloons, bottles and for the game, I cut out SO MANY GOGGLES!

The other game we played was made also using a free printable from here. The original idea was to use a Nerf gun to shoot the aliens but don't have one of those, and instead found a 3-pack of water guns on super clearance from Target. I printed the aliens and space ships on plain printer paper and then 'laminated' them using clear packing tape on the front and back before I cut them out. I did have to tape tongue depressors to the backs to keep the aliens from flopping over. I cut slots into the top of some plastic cups and poked the tongue depressors through there so the aliens would stand up.

The plastic cup setup wasn't ideal, as our water guns were too weak to knock over the aliens but the kids didn't seem to care much and just had fun squirting water all over!

I even got to draw Minions on my cute chalkboard banner! Hooray for colored chalk. Oh, and one last thing we did was that I found Despicable Me printable coloring sheets for the kids to color as we waited for all of the guests to arrive.

The party was really very easy and fun. I made everything the morning of the party although it would have of course been a lot easier to get it ready beforehand (hello, procrastination). We had 4 little guests besides Porter, which was the perfect number. The weather was beautiful (unlike Maren's snowy party) and we were able to do all of the party games outside so I didn't have to worry about 5 excited little boys trashing my house. :)

I think Porter had a happy day! This is him exclaiming over his gift from us, a pet fish. :)