Ultimate Minecraft Party!!

For those of you who don’t know Minecraft, picture our world only everything is formed out of neat little boxes and everyone is carrying some sort of ax or sword they have crafted on their own.  Plus add Creepers.

The invitations were easy to make—there are a ton of Minecraft printables on-line.

They had to be hand-delivered but fortunately pretty much all of Vincenzo’s friends live within a one-mile radius!

I set up for this party early in the day, knowing I wouldn’t have much time to photograph once the boys all arrived. I was right, too—this is the only picture I got of the food table. Imagine each plate heaped with food, plus a cake on one of the big boxes.

Kevin has started cutting me off on my party planning. We still had two hours before the party started, everything was set up and we were just hanging out, and I wanted to draw Creepers on all these balloons. He said no.

But he wasn’t able to stop me from making this…

…or a couple dozen Creeper and Skeleton plates to hang around the yard for the boys to shoot and whack!

Here’s how much I’ve changed in the past nine years: I’ve gone from the mom who didn’t let her son own any guns (which she referred to as “shooters”) and who, when her son did shoot her with sticks or fingers or whatever, pretended it was whipped cream or confetti coming out…to the mom who sends out an e-mail before the birthday party asking everyone to bring Nerf guns, saying, “The more guns the better!”

The boys loved shooting and whacking the bad guys for about five minutes, at which point they turned on each other.

In fact, throughout the party about every 15 minutes everyone would stop what they were doing to spontaneously shoot, hit, wrestle, and/or pummel each other.

When it got to be too much for any of them, they’d sit and quietly make Minecraft perler bead creations. It was the perfect thing for kids like Vincenzo, who are about a head shorter and 20 pounds lighter than the other guys—though the other guys got into it, too.

Some of them got really creative! I turned the creations into necklaces, pins, and key chains on request.

Ironically the only injury incurred during the party was perler bead related. (Half of the table crashed down onto one boy’s leg, taking his half hour’s worth of perler beading plus about 10,000 perler beads with it.)

Speaking of iron-ically, I have never spent so much time ironing during a birthday party. It felt good to be needed, since third grade boys really don’t have much use for mamas anymore.

The boys loved the food display, despite Kevin telling me 9-year-old boys don’t care about details like labels and cobblestone-covered boxes. They loved seeing what food each Minecraft icon was translated to. Some were obvious (melon, golden apples) and some were more creative (blackberries for coal, cheese cubes for gold).

I also put out a couple just-for-fun items from Minecraft:

(Everyone should know someone who owns a dried puffer fish, am I right?)

The table was super simple to set up and looked impressive.  The boys were obsessed with these grass mats!

After dinner they all popped their “TNT” poppers on Vincenzo.

Then it was back to playing Minecraft, perler beading, and bashing each other. The bashing-of-each-other reached a fever pitch around 8 so we put on a movie (again the perler beads came in handy, as not all the kids wanted to watch the movie). Afterwards we played a game I found on-line called DON’T EAT STEVE! Pure awesomeness.

And…the cake!

For favors I made TNT boxes, but it felt wrong to stuff the boxes with so many Twizzlers. It took an entire bag of Twizzles to fill up one box! I ended up putting two rows of Twizzlers in, then stuffed the back of it with silver-wrapped chocolate bars (to represent iron ore), candy pumpkins (to represent pumpkins, duh), and Kit Kats (more dynamite). I don’t know why that felt better, but it did.

And that was it!  Now this boy of mine is the big oh-nine!

WHAT’S COOKIN’ 2NITE:
Pot roast
Pasta with roasted vegetables and garlic
Rice Krispie Treats