Little Man's Minecraft Birthday Party

Minecraft is uber popular in our house.  For those of you not familiar with minecraft, it is basically a virtual lego game that you can play on the computer (or smart phone).  It is primarily a building game with virtual "blocks", and it is one this mom can actually feel pretty good about.  All six of our children play it, and they have created some pretty elaborate minecraft worlds.  Three of the boys are currently working on a minecraft re-creation of Middle Earth.  Anyhoo.... this was Little Man's year for a friend party, and he wanted it to be minecraft.  So minecraft themed it was!

This turned out to be LOTS of fun.  I mean, serious fun.  For all of us.  Every single person helped decorate, come up with game ideas, etc, and so it was very much a family affair!  Here Little Man is helping to create "creeper juice" for our party drinks (small bottles of 7up with the wrapper peeled off and creeper faces drawn on with sharpie).  He is wearing the party favor that we made to give to each of the guests.... a creeper t-shirt!  I bought green shirts at Hobby Lobby for less than $3 each, cut out black squares from iron on fabric, and Little Man and I ironed away.  They turned out great and all the guests loved them.

Daughter H helped hang "spiders" in all the corners of our main floor rooms.

A portal to the nether world.  During the party the nether world was off limits ;) but everyone recognized the portal and thought it was pretty cool!

 The party was planned for the middle of the afternoon, so no meal would need to be served (intentional!), but we did have lots and lots of minecraft themed snack food.  Cheese cubes to represent "lava", and "mushrooms" made out of large marshmallows, chocolate frosting, and white chocolate chips pushed in upside down to make the dots on top.

Pretzel "sticks."

Gummy fish, and two different kinds of TNT:  twizzlers made for more realistic looking TNT, but we also had red gumballs just because they were so fun!

We used mints to represent "jewels" (which you can mine for in the game).

And everyone's favorite.....rice krispie treats colored black to look like coal.  Warning:  the black food coloring is very noticeable on teeth for quite a while afterward. ;)

Square plates of course!

One of our games was shooting TNT with nerf guns.  The guests got a point for each balloon they could hit.  And the TV was on because we had minecraft parodies playing through our TV speakers all afternoon.  There are some really funny ones!  (notice the "ghast" hanging from the ceiling fan ~ in minecraft a ghast is a white ghost-like creature that shoots fire at you when you are in the nether.  In other words, it's a bad guy).

Another game we played was "mining" for jewels in our basement.  We scattered marbles all around our darkened schoolroom and sent the guests down two by two with glow flashlights.

Our go-to pinata spot is out in our backyard, and since there was snow on the ground and it was too cold to be out, we did a candy roll instead of a pinata.  We rolled up a huge ball of saran wrap with candy wrapped throughout it, and the guests had a turn to unroll and could keep all the candy that fell out during their turn.  The person next to them had to roll a 3 or a 6 with a die, and that brought the first person's turn to an end.

It was great fun!

It was exhausting, but totally worth it.  Little Man declared it his BEST.  PARTY.  EVER!  After the party, this is what I very happily rewarded myself with....