oscar's 1st birthday

We just got back from our trip on Thursday so I'm gonna start catching up on blogging. For you non-facebookers, not even 48 hours before we left for our trip, Oscar celebrated his 1st birthday a little early with a Super Mario Kart party. All his favorite cousins and friends were there, not to mention lots of family.

I'd been planning and preparing for months. Things would have been a lot easier if I would just take some graphic design classes, but instead I made these invitations and envelope liners by hand. The invites were originally cereal and pizza boxes, then I covered them with felt and cardstock. Just so you know, the green mushroom in the Mario game is called the 1 up mushroom. Don't worry, I didn't come up with this 1 up mushroom invite idea myself, I saw it somewhere and modified it. They had printed out an image, I went 3-D with the felt, cardstock and sharpie.







Instead of goodie bags, I made goodie cans out of the millions of Oscar's formula cans I couldn't throw away. Then I spray painted them green and covered the top with green cardstock. This was my own creation and original idea. Then I stocked them with wheel yo yo's, mario pencils, mario stickers, candy, and mario blowouts I made myself.


I found some trophies at D.I. for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishers of the race that just so happened to be go-kart trophies.


These are the party blowouts I modified. This was not my original idea, I copied it from someone. But it was great to find these ugly party blowouts at the thrift store for $0.50 and just make them into what I needed with a sheet of paper, a pair of scissors, and a sharpie.





The race was my own idea. I decorated, so I thought, the backdrop of the race just like the background of the game. I made all the "bricks" and question mark boxes out of cardboard boxes, contact paper, and spray paint. The kids cars were cardboard boxes that I spray painted. In order to give the race some difficulty, I made over a hundred "gold coins" the kids had to pick up along the way. I think I spent the most hours of preparation on those gold coins, which were also originally cereal boxes. Then I made little coin bags for the kids to collect their coins in, but never took a picture of them.


The best part of all this party preparation was when I, trying to stay authentic and true to the game's design, kept asking Nate if I was doing one of the decorations correctly according to how the game portrays it. He says, "You do realize none of this stuff is actually from the Mario Kart game, and that you have already really mixed up Mario Kart and Super Mario Brothers right?" While trying so hard to simulate the Mario Kart game exactly, I had no idea I had royally mixed up and combined elements from different games. This is probably because I never really even played either game that much. So why did I choose this theme for Oscar's birthday then? Solely for the fact that I wanted to dress him up as toad, in nothing but a diaper and a vest.


There was a path for the race, marked by orange rubber cones, that started in our backyard and winded through our front yard and then back again to the backyard.


Nate and I dressed up like Mario and Luigi but never got a picture of us together.







The winners




We tried to dress Oscar up as Toad, and I made his little vest,(ha I cut out some felt real crazy like) and hat,(spray painted shower cap that crusted off every time he pulled it off.)


I made his cake from one of those giant cupcake cake pans, then did red frosting and mentos. I saw the mentos idea smoewhere and copied it.