Mario & Yoshi Birthday Party!

For Heather. :) I'm blogging the combined Yoshi Party I did for Koby & Ryan's birthday parties last year. These pics are not in any type of order. And I only blogged pictures showing what preparations were put into the party.

Yoshi Egg Smash!

First, get some eggs. While holding an egg, gently tap the top of the pointier end with a butter knife until it smashes a tiny area. Take the knife and pry the smashed egg shell bits out, creating a small hole on the top. Then drain the yolk out of the egg. After it's all out, rinse over and over with hot water. I also added an extra squirt of bleach into the egg as I was rinsing it out to help combat salmonella.

I then placed the egg into the carton with the hole pointed downward and let it dry. Once the eggs were all dry, I took a green permanent marker and drew spots on each one.

Time to fill the eggs! I just took a small piece of paper and made a funnel. This made it a LOT easier to spoon glitter into each egg. I used 3 different colors of glitter, and ended up filling each egg 1/3 full.

Then I added some foil stars to each one. Then, (I forgot to blog the pic) I put a large red fabric star into 3 of the eggs, which acted as the "prize" eggs.

To close the egg, you cut small round circles out of white tissue paper. I tried to make the circles just large enough to cover the holes I made.

You put glue all around the edges of the hole

then add the tissue paper and press flat. Let dry with glued side facing up.

These are the cupcakes we made- "1-Up Cupcakes" ! Pretty self-explanitory. I used vanilla cake, colored some vanilla frosting green, topped with white m&m's (found at Walmart in candy isle, sold in individual color packets). I used white cupcake liners and then drew the eyes on before I frosted them.

Some of our decorations:

We put 2 long tables together and used some table cover paper the stake center had on hand, lol. Then we taped balloons on the stage. This was for the luncheon afterward.

This is an "after" picture of the food table. Pizza, cheetos, fruit drinks, grapes, and cupcakes

Now, I know I took TONZ more photos of this party, but it wasn't in with the pics we found. Oh, well. Here's an example of what we did in the room where the boys opened their gifts. I downloaded a buttload of Mario clipart, then printed them, then arranged a few pics on a 12x12 paper. We taped these up all over the room, including a bunch of Mario coloring pages I had the kids color. Way cheap way to decorate. lol.

One of the items I put in the loot bags: I bought some small sized candy ziplock baggies (I think I found them in the isle with all the wedding cake supplies) and added regular green m&ms, and a few spotted mint m&ms in each bag, then stapled the note on top.

Here's the note. Basically, I downoaded a pic of yoshi, put a red background around it, and manipulated the writing to say what I wanted it to say. If you can't read it, it says, "It was a "treat" celebrating our birthdays with you! Mario & Yoshi say, "Thank You", too!"

Yoshi Loot Bags! These weren't too difficult to make. I just bought a bunch of green lunch bags, green ribbon (I actually tied it in the back, but I don't have the pic of that!), printed out the eyes and cut out the round noses. Easy. I still have all the pdf files with the eyes if you want them. We added a ton of stuff to these loot bags. It's been a whole year so I don't know if I'll remember everything, but I do remember in each bag we put an m&m bag I made, a capri sun drink, a bag of fruit snacks, a zinger, and a small "mario question mark box" full of chocolate coins (that again, I don't have a picure of, but I KNOW I took zillions of!!). I also have the patterns for the do-it-yourself boxes if you want.

The sign on the outside of the doors

Another picture of the food table

Here are some of the games!

This was the "Yoshi Egg Hunt". We tossed a bunch of chocolate eggs (purchased around Easter time, lol) and plastic eggs decorated by my kids, filled with bubble gum coins, toys, or more candy. Each "group" of kids got to go in and get as many eggs as they could. I really wanted to sew some mushroom pouches (I have a pic of them) for each person, but ran out of time and money. lol.

The pinatas. I made both of them. Pain in the BUTT! I found out that it's totally worth the money spent to just buy the darn things. Lol. The younger kids (Ryan's friends) had the "mushroom" pinata

Ooops! out of order pic. These are the plastic eggs I had my kids draw spots on for the Yoshi Egg hunt.

And a pic of Ryan's loot from the Yoshi Egg Hunt.

The older kids (Koby's friends) had the "Yoshi Egg" pinata.

The two pinatas before.

Another game: "Yoshi Egg Pass". This was a very fun game for the kids. I just took my green exercise ball and taped a bunch of white circles to it to make it look like an egg. The kids passed it around while music was going, then when I stopped the music, the person who had the egg was out.

And then we have the "Yoshi Egg Smash"! This is where the kids were able to throw the eggs (that I so lovingly worked on) into the wall to see if their egg was one of the 3 "prize" eggs. Wow. MESSY! I'm so glad I put up plastic and had them do this on the gym floor. It was still a mess to vacuum, but that's okay.

A pic of the kids getting ready to "rotate" to the next game

A pic of the kids afterward with their party hats a.k.a. "Yoshi Hats" that I spent FOR.EV.ER on!! I have the link to the site that I got the idea from if you want, but in my opinion? Skip it. It took SOOOO long to do, and they just trashed it after the first 10 minutes, lol!

Another fun thing: I had the boys dress up as Mario and Luigi. We also encouraged the guests to come dressed up, but nobody did. lol.

I highly recommend having the guests sit and watch the birthday child(ren) open gifts first. This worked great because the ones who were a little late didn't miss anything. This also took a good 1/2 hour. Oh! I forgot- while they were opening gifts, we played a bunch of Mario soundbytes (mp3s) in the background that we had downloaded. We have a copy of those, too, if you'd like. These sounds are actually what we used during the music for the Yoshi Egg Pass game, too.

Gosh. I wish I could find the REST of the pics, because there's so much more to it! I will blog the rest of what I had downloaded to use for the party but never did, just in case you want to do it, or it could give you inspiration. lol.

What's cool, is now Walmart sells TONZ of "Mario" items including posters, clothing, stuffed animals, toys, etc, so it's a lot easier to have a "Mario" themed party NOW than it was a year ago. Also, I have to put a plug in for Amazon.com. They have SO many items relating to Mario, Yoshi, etc. This is where I bought most of the boys' mario toys and items.

Anyway. This took me forever to do, and I can only get on my blog on the weekends, so there you have it! Lol. I will blog more recent stuff and photos next time. :)