Rocking the house

Ronja turned 8, a while ago actually, end of November. But who´s got time for birthday parties in December, when you need to go attend Christmas celebrations every weekend?
So we only had a small party in November, and sceduled her big birthday party for January Yesterday was the day, so we had 12 kids over, and yeah, it was quite some fun.

This year, we didn´t go for a motto party (I love! motto parties...), because Ronja wanted to have an all traditional kids party. Which we then had. And maybe you can steal some ideas?

For the entrance, I set up a costume station. I threw all our through-the-years-collected-costumes in a basket, added some monster teeth and sticky mustaches from the dollar store, and, of course, face paint, and let the kids rock it out.

Miro uses every occasion to wear a skirt and a wig, I swear.

That easily fills half an hour, or more. In fact, I had to stop them. Also, I took pictures of all of them, sitting in the throne, to add to the give away packages.

I also got some sticky tape. Sticky tape is good for everything. I marked a hopscotch field in the entrance hall, and was happy to see the kids actually used it.

Then I marked this field on the kitchen table:

I let the kids form two groups, and blow the pompons over the table. Pompoms over the first mark give 1 point, over the second give 5, and pompoms on the floor take 5 points away.

Having formed those two groups, we played "Parcour".

I gave the first group tape, ribbon, chairs, chalk, whatever, and told them they had five minutes to set up a difficult parcour for the other group. Then, all kids of the second group, had to run through this parcour, with me stopping the time. And then reverse.

For the waiting in between, I had brought up this guy:

 I made him last year for the twins´ 4th birthday party, from an old cardboard box, and you throw balls into his mouth.

Then we had mice on a string.

For some reason, Ronja had always wanted to make this. And I had always been to lazy to thread 36 jello mice on strings, for a game that lasts 5 minutes. This year, I did it. And it did take long to thread them, but Ronja helped me, and it did only take 5 minutes, but the kids had lots and lots of fun, so I guess it was worth it. And it made a nice decoration, too.
Next was cutting flour.

 This game is only for the daredevils among you - you pile a whole package of flour on a plate, and some sweet on the top. The kids get a knife, and the each kid cuts away a slice of the flour, carefully, so the sweet on top won´t fall down. When it falls down, this is what happens:

 Doing this with mustaches and make up adds a nice extra cheer. And it soes lead to kids smearing their faces with flour and lots of cleaning up. But I remember how much I loved it as a kid, so I threw it in.
By the way, I was lucky to find these in a dollar store:

And after each game, I handed out one to each kid. They were thrilled by it, and could either collect them, or trade them in for sweets.
And of course we played toilet-paper-mummy.

We seem to play that one on every party, I think. And later, they all dance around in the smashed toilet paper.

Oh, and of course we had to play hit-the pot, because even for 8 year olds, it´s still the best game on the planet. And we played eating chocolate (wrapped in newspaper, with a knife and a fork and mittens on), and murder in the disco, in the dark, with glowsticks, and me firing the glitter-confetti canon, and while I was preparing the ice cream, Tim took them out to play a fish game in the garden: All the kids are little fish, except for one. That´s the shark. Tim tells a story, the little fish do as he says, and as soon he says the word "shark"; the shark comes out to eat them all. And they all run around screaming.
And before I forget it - you don´t think I could throw a party without labelling bottles, do you?

I love labelling bottles!

So, that was our party. And most of it is, indeed, allready cleaned up. Tim took the kids swimming, so I´m home alone, and it was almost silent, if I didn´t have to blast Lisa Hannigan through the house:

Oh man, how I love this song, and video. I think it´s so cheerfull and bright, and very sexy, too. Really, sit through it, and watch her getting splashed with paint. So very inspirational... I can hardly wait for summer to come and have a family paint event in the garden.