OS Children's Parties

rainbowkanga

Reading the very useful "gift cupboard" thread made me think about ideas for children's parties. Like one of the post-ers on that thread I have 2 children at primary school and 1 toddler and so we get invited to loads of parties - all the usual MacDonalds/Wacky Warehouse/entertainers - which work out so expensive and I must admit some of them that I have "sat in" with my children have not been done that well by the "professionals" either. Whilst I don't agree with just keeping up with others for the sake of it - I do want my children to have lovely birthday parties - I have so many memories of my own as a child....so I just wondered what other OS moneysavers have done for their children? Here are my 3 best parties so far....

....Craft party for my 6 yr old - our local cafe/pottery charges £15 per child to put on a party!!!! I ordered materials from a couple of internet craft sites/found stuff in sales and had a table doing beads/jewellery; one painting little cardboard 'treasure' boxes then going back later to stick 'jewels' on; one drawing on minature mugs I found which then went in the oven; and a key ring table. Each child then drew a picture on a little fabric bag - and hey no need for party bags as they took home a lovely bag they'd made themselves full of also lovely crafts! I reckon with everything it cost me £3 per child. It did need high adult supervision but I 'roped' in family who later admitted they really enjoyed themselves! And there were lots of crafty bits left for my children to do on rainy days!

....Charlie and the Chocolate Party for my 7 year old - we sent out golden tickets wrapped around a small bar of chocolate, copying the exact wording from the book. I only had 8 children to this as I was a bit worried about mess, though there was surprisingly little! On arrival we did various chocolcatey games, then had borrowed some chocolate moulds from a friend and they all made some little chocolates, had gingerbread dough pre-prepared and they cut out some biscuits. For the food had made some HM pizza dough, cut into 8 small circles which they topped themselves - and they then watched a little bit of the film (old one though as hadn't got new one!). They had chocolates and gingerbread to take home and total cost was about £16.

...Football party for my 4 year old - some of his friends had been to our local club for their party - but we had a church hall and husband and I did an hour of football/team games - was exhausting and we did use up our 'fall back' games but good fun!!

I'd love to hear others ideas.....

Happy New Year!

thriftlady_2

My advice for children's parties is DON'T HAVE THEM!! they are hell! :eek:

Seriously,I like to give my kids a proper party at home with proper party food and games.I have a cut-off point of 6 yrs after that its a friend and the cinema or similar treat.

My best effort was for ds2's 6th(and final) party.It was a Spider Party.I bought spider balloons from a party supplies shop online-basically long black balloons for legs and round ones for bodies and then twisted together.
We played pin the spider on the web,made spiders out of egg boxes and pipe cleaners,musical spiders(when the music stops jump on a spider) and The Great SpiderWeb game.For this I wound coloured yarn around the room to form a giant web.I used a different colour for each child and they had to unwind their thread until they came to the end which was tied to a bar of chocolate.I made a spider cake covered in lurid purple and green buttercream and sent them home with a bag of vile spider jelly sweets from the pick n' mix at Woolies.A good time was had by all children and I had a large drink.

There is a lovely book of birthday ideas available from Amazon called The Birthday Book by Ann Druitt,Christine Fynes-Clinton and Marije Rowling.Well worth the price,I'm going to try out the pinata idea for my dd's final party in March-it'll be the last party I do so I'm going to pull out all the stops.