Superhero party on a budget (games and ideas)

So last Friday my eldest baby turned 6, and yes I say this every year but where did that time go?

He has flown through his first year at school and now we are almost at the Christmas nativity (in which he is one of many shepherds)!

Alex has a thirst for information and since I bought an Usbourne Atlas book for him for Christmas he has loved Geography and also finding out which things are in which country which is really great and nice to see he wants to have knowledge of it all too.

Being a typical 6 year old boy he is also in to many typical boy things like lego and superheroes so there wasn't really much surprise when he asked for me to make an Iron man cake for his birthday-I did however persuade him that making the whole of iron man would be a bit tricky and that just his face would be a lot better ;) for my cake tutorial please check in this weekend...

With money being usually tight I knew we couldn't afford a 'proper' party this year as they are just so expensive, but luckily Alex just wanted a party at home, great I thought until we saw the list of people he wanted. The thought of 16 kids in the house with just myself, mum and James to control them was a little un-nerving but we got there!

It was chaos and they were hyper but we did have some vague plans and times at which to do it! Pinterest as always was invaluable! (Here's my board for the party for more ideas).

I had spent hours making lots of super hero masks using these templates. I think I made about 20 so they had a choice and to leave extras in case any went wrong or got lost. I used cereal boxes and then covered in coloured paper, this would be a lot quicker if you have thick coloured card (I just tried to make it as cheap as I could for myself using bits we already had)!

Alex's mask

I went onto Baker Ross to find they have some super hero stickers and tattoos, I also needed star stickers, sticky back gems and elastic for the masks, they also sold glow sticks which I needed for a game and for the party bags.

They came in and made their masks straight away-this actually didn't take as long as I had hoped it would ;)

As some were finishing up their masks they gradually all queued up to play pin the badge on batman. I'd just cut a large black piece of paper up in a rough batman shape and used yellow paper to make the badges and stuck double sided foam shapes on the back.

After that Alex wanted to play traditional games such as musical bumps and statues which they all really liked as most kids that age do.

Then we played the game 3 corners (usually 4 corners but it was in our lounge so had to cut one corner out due to space) I placed a super hero in each of the three corners, the music played and they danced in the middle, when it stopped they ran to one of the corners whilst I had 3 pictures of the super heroes behind my back and picked one-whoever is on that person are out and you just play on until there is one left.

Then I manically got some of the food sorted that couldn't be done until last minute whilst they played this game, which my husband said they loved. They sat down on the floor in a circle and I got a bunch of 6 green glow sticks taped together and we called it kryptonite (which kills superman if I am correct). Basically they pass this around to music like pass the parcel, but whoever landed with the kryptonite was out and instead of waiting around they came into the kitchen to get their food. This worked really well as meant there weren't 16 kids all around the table choosing their food at the exact same time. James said it was quite hard to get to a winner so the last two spilt the 6 green glow sticks to keep in their party bags.

As we had so many children and have so few chairs in our house we put out picnic rugs on our kitchen floor for them to eat on, surprisingly they really didn't make too much mess and they also had very healthy appetites, I am not sure the school fed them lunch that day!!

We did a typical party buffet of pizza, sausage and cheese rolls, sandwiches, cheese and pineapple, crisps, bread-sticks, cucumber and carrots. After their savouries we sang our happy birthday's and then moved onto dessert.

I'd made a traffic light jelly, and made plenty of cupcakes, I'd bought super hero toppers for them on eBay which Alex loved, I also put out some biscuits of party rings and chocolate fingers!

After the food we played a quick game with some t shirts and balloons, Alex and two others who he chose wore James' and my old tops and we had blown up plenty of balloon (really small) and the kids had to fill the tops up to make them look muscular like super heroes. This was a fun game but it did get rather hectic so would may be better with slightly fewer children!

I loved how Alex ended up looking

After that we had about 10/15 minutes to spare and we were reaching the end of our tether slightly as they were bouncing off the walls, James put his projector on in the playroom and they started watching The Incredibles until their parents arrived-they were sat down so quietly for this and it actually worked out really well for pick up time too as we just called them out with their parent was there.

Alex had a great party, and although hectic there were no problems and for the most part the kids did behave (James did however move his TV upstairs after it nearly being knocked a few times in the first few minutes!), I am hoping next year Alex will choose slightly less children though ;) As ever my mum who works in a nursery was the best of help too, don't know how I would do it without her help!

We had our family over literally straight after so I didn't get to sit down until late at night and then couldn't sleep until gone 2.30am, Sam delightfully woke me at 6.30 too...! The next few days we spent building and playing new Lego sets mainly as he was so lucky and had lots of new sets along with lots of other cool gifts too! I would say that's all the birthday's over for a while but it was mine yesterday, James' on the 3rd and Sam's on the 9th Dec!