My Misters & Me: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Birthday Party

My baby is getting ready to turn 5 in a few weeks. I literally can not wrap my head around FIVE. I just keep turning it over and over in my head wondering how it has went so fast. (And then I read this by Katie and this by The Nester and I basically just sob because it never stops. Parenting is so lovely and strangely hard. #bittersweet) Anyways, back to the point at hand - Ninja Turtles! When my nearly-5 baby was nearly-4 he desperately wanted a TMNT birthday party. Because I take a long time to process my thoughts and am a terrible blogger who doesn't post things anywhere online in a timely fashion this post is a year late. But somehow it feels ok to share this party in honor of his upcoming birthday, which I know makes no sense to anyone but me. #thatsok

I love, love, love being a boy mama. I love the loud, dirty, wrestling around, skinned knees-ness of boys. But one of the things I struggle with HARD are characters. Oy, the characters. And boy characters pretty much all follow the same themes - they fight, they defeat bad guys, they have super powers &/or are weird. So when TMNT came up I fought it. I am fighting the good fight for all of us character-disliking mamas out there - and I am epically losing. Bleh. So when this came around as the toy/character of choice I decided that I would be ok with the fun-happy-silly turtles of the 80's, not the mean, aggressive, grunting TMNT of 2014. (I'm hoping that I'm not the only mother out there who has grossly over thought this.)

But I digress. So, how about if I actually talk about the party? After over-analyzing if we should do this theme or something else I knew that our kiddo would love it the most and we went for it. Honestly I had no idea how to make it fun. I wanted it to be interactive and not just a lot of cutesy decorations. I decided pretty early on that I needed a few basics to do this party.

Pretty simple, right? This party was very easy to set up. We created a maze that had Turtle silhouettes on foam core at the entrances. The maze was made of plastic electrical conduit that was cut in thirds, Dollar Tree pool noodles, and crepe paper streamers. The whole maze cost around $20. We had clothes line poles at our last house and we hung balloons at varying heights from the clothes lines. That was the biggest hit of the whole party with the kids! At the entrance of the maze we set up a tub with foam swords (also from the Dollar Tree) and DIY TMNT masks. We didn't have many girls at the party but I can attest that the boys LOVED the swords and fighting the balloons. Those things didn't stand a chance! If you are throwing your own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle themed party this is the one thing that you have to do!

I wish that the pictures of the yard weren't so blown out. But that's what happens when you have to shoot in full sun, you get the harsh sun/shade shadow. To do the maze take your 10 foot electrical conduit and cut it into 3 pieces with a saw. Then take a rubber mallet and tap them into the ground. Slide your pool noodle over the tubing and then wrap the paper around streamers around different sections of the noodles making 'walls'. Seriously, the possibilities are endless with this idea. For the turtle silhouettes I picked up the black foam core from the Dollar Tree (#unofficialsponsor) and had my friend from Sprinkle The Kindness make me the turtle silhouettes. She also cut the letters for the Happy Birthday sign behind the cupcake/gift table.

The rest of the party was just as simple. I did paint the TMNT peg dolls for the cupcakes, but those were mostly for me because I thought it would be cute (my son declares that he 'hates peg dolls') and I wanted to do them. For something similar you could look for something on Etsy or just use smaller figurines. I had grabbed the green 'Pizza' banner after Christmas because I had a sneaking suspicion I would end up doing a turtle party. I used some striped washi tape to spell 'Pizza'. I used a scrap piece of wood to make a 'Mutagen' sign for a batch of green punch.