I feel like my son’s 5th birthday snuck up on me.  I was so busy worrying about our costumes that I completely forgot his birthday is soon after Halloween.  Last year he was sick with the croup twice in a row so we canceled his birthday party.  It was two months later when he asked me if he was going to have a birthday party.  Ouch.  This year, I wanted to make sure he had a super birthday party.

Turbo said he wanted to have a LEGO Hero Factory party.  I wasn’t quite sure where to go with that so we sat down and searched Pinterest for ‘LEGO Hero Factory party’ ideas.  As you can imagine nothing came up.  I asked him if it would be okay if we narrowed our search to ‘LEGO Party’ and he agreed.  So many cool ideas for LEGO parties have been pinned.  Turbo sat with me and pointed out ideas he liked and wanted to have at his party.  The first thing he pointed out was a race car ramp.  We checked out cakes and cookies.  When I asked him if he wanted a cake or cupcakes he knew he wanted a cake.  I’m not much of an artisan with cakes.  I offered to make him a LEGO Brick cake and he thought that would be cool.  *whew*  We found a cool LEGO Bingo game that he said he’d like to play.

I did come up with one of my own ideas, a Pin the LEGO Piece game.  My mom always made a pin the piece game for parties.  The one I remember the best was a Wonder Woman she made for my sister’s party.  She free handed all the pieces.  I’m much better with technology and I’ve been dying to find a reason to have a large engineering print made.

I set up a LEGO piece photo shoot.  I shot the image for his invitations and a close up of a standard LEGO man for the pin the piece game.  Then I took super close up shots of as many tiny LEGO accessories as I could find; hats, fish, cups, flasks, stars, hair, and a diamond to name a few.  I sent the LEGO man photo to Abadan, our local print store, to be printed as a 2×3 foot engineering print.  It looked so cool!  I printed out the accessory pieces at home, trying to make them the right size for our large engineering print out.  Little was a good helper.  She grabbed the print outs and brought them to me as I was printing them.  She loves retrieving paper from the printer.  Turbo was super excited about his party and carried around the printed LEGO pieces until I put them up so they would be ready for the party.  I found a LEGO font to use for the invitations and thank you cards.  I had the images to be printed as photos.  I stuck the invitations in envelopes as they were.  Turbo helped me glue the thank you photos to cards so he could write in them.

Turbo was keen on the LEGO Minifigure Bingo game.  As I scrolled through the call cards and boards I thought about replacing some of the Minifigure images with ones my son would know and his favorites like Batman.  I have Adobe Acrobat, so switching out a few images and text wouldn’t be a big deal.  Well, after I had added Turbo’s favorites, reorganized the board layout to be more like traditional Bingo, and added letters to the call cards it might have been less work for me to have started new!  I found most of the Minifigure images from the LEGO website and searched the web for some too.  Here’s my version of LEGO Minifigure Bingo (.pdf 3.2Mb) call cards and boards.  I printed the call cards full size and the boards 2 to a page on card stock.  Then I laminated the boards and we used dry erase markers with them.  It was a hit at the party and we ended up playing the game for several rounds two different times.

My sister and I were chatting the day before the party and she asked if there was anything she could do.  “Yes! Do you have any colorful paper at your disposal?” I asked.  I really wanted to print out the LEGO Bumps from Deliacreates, but was running out of time to get things done before the party.  Thanks to my sister we had a great colorful wall of LEGO bumps.  Turbo enjoyed helping us hang the brick bumps on the wall.  We used the bumps to wrap the juice boxes like bricks too.

When the kids arrived they could build a crown with the LEGO bump paper, race LEGO cars down a ramp, and free play with the LEGO bricks we set out.  I sorted out wheels and axle type pieces from the majority of the bricks so they could build their own vehicle creations easily.  There were a few pre-built LEGO cars ready for racing.  We used a piece of press board for the race ramp.  It wasn’t nearly as big as the table ramp we saw on Pinterest, but if fit our space and Turbo was pleased with it.

There are so many cool ideas for putting together the gift bags.  I’d nearly run out of time for putting the party together, so for the gift bags we splurged.  I bought the bagged LEGO sets I found by Target’s checkouts.  This was our biggest expense.  If only I had bought a bunch of those box sets I found on clearance for $2.50 a while back; oh well right?  I printed out activity pages from the LEGO website, two on a page, and made a little activity booklet to include with the building sets.  You have to search within each LEGO product line website to find their printable stuff;  LEGO City had the most.

One of the hardest parts of planning the party was deciding on a guest list.  I’ve always had this idea in my head that you should only invite as many guests as you are old.  Turbo was turning 5 and he has more than 5 friends.  It was hard not to invite all his friends.  Even after we sent the invitations I kept worrying that we should invite more people.  I think it was okay that we didn’t invite a ton of kids.  The party size was good and it was enjoyable, not overwhelming.

I framed the engineering print and hung it in my son’s room.  It’s a nice reminder of all the fun he had at “the best birthday party ever!”