Harper Turns 7/ Minecraft Party

Our little buddy Harper celebrated his 7th birthday this past Saturday. I love when the kids can have their parties on their actual birthdays, it seems a little more special when that happens. I could write all the cliche stuff like how I can't believe how big he's become (which I can't) or how much I love him (immensely and with all my heart) but instead I'll just get on with the coolness that was his party.

Harper has become a huge fan of Minecraft this year and when I asked what kind of party he wanted it was the first thing he thought of. I don't know much about Minecraft other than it was one of Landon's first loves and is now something Harper and Dakota enjoy. I knew some of the character names and that it's an endless world of building possibilities, but beyond that, nothing. Using Pinterest as my guide, I came up with some cute party decorations and games. How did people even live without Pinterest?! Using their own imaginations? The horror.

The cake was just chocolate with chocolate frosting and then some green jimmies to mimic the grass block design used in the game. I used toothpicks as torches (and to hold up the foil so the cake didn't get messed up) and the little paper (creeper, Steve, pig) figures were from a set I purchased on Amazon. I saw this cute idea to make lava buckets using strawberry ice cream and orange soda...the kids really liked them too!

I held the party from 2-4 pm because I didn't want to have to worry about serving a meal. I did that with Dakota's last party and it worked great just serving snack food so that's what we did for Harper too. There were LOTS of ideas for food and I just went with some simple kid friendly stuff. I found printable card labels for all of the food on Pinterest as well. We had Sticks (pretzel sticks), Melon, Fish (goldfish), Redstone (Doritos), Slimeballs (green grapes), Carrots, Apples and Water Buckets (blue jello cups). I forgot to get a picture when all the food was out but it was a decent spread. 

One easy to put together game was pin the tail on the pig. Everything is made with squares/rectangles, so it's very simple. I cut lots of pink curly tails (they are hanging at the top of the poster board) and the kids did their best to pin the tail on the pig. We used the cardboard Steve and Creeper heads (we turned them around backwards so they couldn't see out of the eye holes) in lieu of a blindfold.

Using some square white plates and sharpies I created a Hit the Ghast game. I put out a couple of Nerf guns and that game was a big hit!

Another cool thing we did was create a treasure hunt. Using this kit Tony and Dakota built lots and lots of little paper blocks. Inside the blocks were little squares of paper, one for each item in the treasure hunt. I printed out and glued to poster board the items the kids had to search around the yard and find. There were 48 hidden items but about 60 blocks so some of them were empty which made it a little more of a challenge. The kids were off and running all over the yard to find the hidden items and before we knew it the board was filled. It was a great way to keep them busy for at least 15 minutes!

In between games the kids played outside and in the basement. Surprisingly the basement wasn't destroyed in the process and the kids were having a terrific time playing together. Before everyone left we let them take a whack at my altered TNT pinata. You can't find official Minecraft stuff anywhere so I picked up a pinata in the shape of dice, ripped the white dots off and used card stock to make it look like a TNT block. 

The candy from the pinata would really have been plenty of a goody bag but I couldn't resist making a few things I found on Pinterest! So, included in the goody bags were Minecraft bookmarks, party poppers that I covered with a TNT printable as well as a full size Hershey bar covered with a Creeper printable I found. The bag tags were too cute to pass on as well! Michaels had bubble wands 2 for $1 so those went home as well. Each one was a labeled with a potion, such as, potion of water breathing or potion of poison etc. 

Once everyone had left Harper got to open his gifts. He got quite a few Lego Minecraft kits, a few GREAT games (I'll blog about those soon), a microscope and a huge blow up rocket to toss around the yard. As I mentioned before, there aren't any official Minecraft products available so I painted a few of my square gifts to resemble creatures from the game. Have I lost my mind? Probably. 

I'm kind of glad that the birthday parties are over for the year. Between the four summer birthday's in my house and the birthdays of friends, I'm partied out! 

Happy Birthday to my Sweetest Harps!