As you all know, I am a born event planner. It is my obsession/hobby to create! It comes easy to me and I love the whole process (well, clean up the next day sucks for sure)! So when my boys came to me and told me they wanted a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party, my heart sank! I said "Boys, you know your mommy can throw an amazing party for you right here in the backyard, right?" I started promising them freakin pony rides and superheroes...to no avail. :( They saw that stupid Chuck E. Cheese commercial and their heart was set.
Despite my disappointment, I do love a challenge! :) Fortunately they wanted to do a Wreck-It Ralph theme which I thought would work perfectly since it's all about arcade characters. Now, with every party I have a budget. My budget is $500 for a birthday party (there may or may not be times that I do go over that by a couple hundred dollars, but let's not let the hubby know that). What? Things add up! :) That budget includes EVERYTHING from the venue, decor, all the food, presents we get them, costumes, favors, ect.
Since having 12 kids at Chuck E. Cheese already cost me $225, I had $275 to spend on making this a little more custom to my family. Listen, let's be real, these birthday parties are about the kids, I certainly want to give them a magical experience and what they envision. But since this is my hobby, it's about me too. If I'm the one planning the event, I want it to look the way I have planned in my head too. Am I a little OCD? Yes. Am I ok with it? Yes. :)
First of all we have to have costumes! :) Costumes always make parties so much more fun! :)
Now, getting my husband to dress up like I want isn't always going to happen, LOL! But he's a good sport in meeting me half way! :) So we all gave it a good attempt without spending an arm and a leg.
Now, back to Chuck E. Cheese. My personal opinion is that I hate character parties. When everything is covered in the commercially produced Elmo image, it steals my ability to be creative. So I like keeping the decor more basic, and throwing in the characters in smaller quantities. I think it makes it less busy on the eyes. So I decided to go with the chevron pattern for this party since it looks like the brick building that Ralph likes to wreck in the movie :)
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| All the chevon materials were purchased at www.orientaltrading.com |
There's not a lot of room to work with on the tables at Chuck E. Cheese. So basically I had one end to decorate. And the centerpiece was this cake made by my friend from Lexie Cakes! She did an amazing job, spent 16 hours making this and delivered it to the venue! Contact Lexie Cakes
I wanted the cake from the movie, but obviously it is way too high and too much cake for just 12 kids. So we compromised.
And look at this inside! She did a 4 layer cake on top of a Styrofoam block! Genius!
So this was the outcome!
We had a welcome sign:
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| All the printables I designed myself and printed at Staples on cardstock. |
Gold Medals for the heroes! This was a huge part of the movie and a great way to keep an eye on all the kids in our party.
Instead of using Chucky's little plastic cups, I wanted to give each kid a bucket with their name on it so we could identify it from all the other kids playing there at that time. They loved that it said "duty" like in the movie!
Each child also got a hammer like Fix-It Felix's as well as a toy brick like what Wreck-It Ralph slept on each night.
Then at each place setting I gave them their basic paper products with their name on their cup.
We even had a live band! :)
Then it was time to play! And they just wanted more and more gold coins!!! :)
How cute is Felix? :)
Chuck E. Cheese gives the birthday kids an opportunity to stand in the ticket blaster and grab as many extra tickets as they can get.
They loved it!
And Chucky showed up to give them crowns and sing Happy Birthday to them!
All and all it was the easiest birthday party I've ever done. And thank goodness because it was the week school ended and Swim Meets started and we were extremely busy.
It was also very fun! The kids loved every second. And just so you know, you'll spend an extra $60 on more tokens for the games. They were going through them like candy!
But I feel like I accomplished my goal of making a "packaged" party more custom to us and memorable. It was a good mix of being creative and easy! I would definitely do it again there!
p.s. my favorite part of a party is watching the kids open their presents. We ran out of time and I was so bummed we couldn't do it there with the gift giver. So we went home and opened them and this was the aftermath! :)
What a mess! And totally worth it!
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