Cars

Our son wanted a cars theme party for his 8th birthday. We bought some of the decorations from a party store and made others. I used a black plastic table cloth on the table and white duct tape to make a road. We used checkered flags and orange cones down the center to add to the theme.

We stacked chocolate donuts to look like piles of Luigi's tires.

The main cakes were actually cupcakes decorated to look like Mater from the movie Cars. I made the cakes in regular muffin tins and also in mini muffin tins. Frost one regular size cup cake with chocolate frosting to be the main body. Frost one mini cup cake to be the bed of the truck and one mini cupcake turned upside down on top of the regular cupcake to be the top of the truck. We used m&ms for the lights and eyes and white gum squares for the teeth. The tires on the truck were Junior Mints. We tried various different chocolate cookies and candies to find the ones that looked like the best size for our cupcakes. We frosted the windshield with white frosting and added eyes. It was hard to get the frosting smooth but the boys loved the shape and eating them.

We used car theme stickers for an activity inside before going outside for the race activity.

We set up a race track outside and each child had a cardboard box that we spray painted to look like a car. We put black paper plates on the sides for tires and printed out faces for the front. We had a few races and prizes for the winners and then the boys just played with the cars and had a lot of fun just running around with them.

The party was a lot of fun and our son loved it.

Circus/Carnival Party

We have two birthdays on the same day. My husband and our youngest son. Most years the party is combined with the theme chosen by our son. This year he wanted a Circus theme. I made cupcakes with clown toppers and cupcakes made to look like popcorn with mini marshmallows and yellow coloring. The ones with the lollipop balloons were for the birthday boys.

We had a lot of carnival type activities including a face painting booth.

A photo backdrop that we bought from Oriental Trading along with other party supplies.

We had circus props for playing with as well.

There were lots of party games and prizes.

Prizes were bags of goldfish crackers, boxes of animal crackers or candy. Sometimes at carnivals people win real gold fish for a prize so we used gold fish crackers instead.

We collect the rubber ducks and had some from different parties we have had as well as the circus theme ones for this party. We put them all in a baby pool and played a duck game where some ducks were marked with a star on the bottom and the kids picked a duck and if they got one with a star they won a prize. 

Other games were a Ring Toss where we used pool rings to toss over bottles and a Bean Bag Can Tumble game where the kids threw bean bags at a can tower.

We also had a photo booth that we made to look like a circus tent.

The most fun  of course was the circus/carnival foods. We had bags of roasted peanuts in the shell, Popcorn, corn dogs, chili dogs, nachos and lemonade.

Great fun was had by everyone!