Super Hero Birthday Party

My son turned THREE!? Is this for real?? I can't believe he's growing up so fast...

Lately he's been obsessed with 3 things: Cars, planes, and Super Heroes. His favorite super hero is He-Man, but since it's now 2014, He-Man decorations aren't exactly easy to come by. So we decided to just go with Super Heroes in general as the theme for his birthday party. We stuck with the basic colors: blue, red, and yellow.

First, the invitation:

I found a really cool invitation on SnapFish.com that looked kinda like this, but I didn't want to pay $30. So I started designing it myself. I found the little superhero images from a Google search, as well as the background and the city outline. I then sent my idea to my best friend and she tweaked the heck out of it and came up with this! It was perfect! We printed them on card stock and voila! She also designed the envelope.

 

How cool is that!? 

Okay, on to the actual party.

The "fun" table. For the buildings I used cardboard out of the recycling bin at worked and covered them with plan black paper and cut up some yellow squares for the windows. The little signs I cut out of poster board from Dollar Tree. The red streamer also came from Dollar Tree... as did all the table cloths.

Even the grandparents got in on the tattoo fun! We found these at Walmart the night before the party and couldn't resist. 

The masks were cut out of the same poster board as the signs. I found templates here. 

Random stickers from Walmart and Dollar Tree.

Foam swords from Amazon (6 total) The kids had so much fun beating each other up with these. 

Can't have a party without PIZZA!

Fruit punch (sugar free drink mix) came from Walmart. Straws came from Amazon (144 in a box and we used around 10. We may never run out!!)

Super Suckers! These guys took forever to make. The box is just another box I took from the recycling bin at work covered in red paper (also from work). I poked holes in it and stuck the suckers in. Voila! I got the sucker idea from my sister who threw her son a Super Hero party last year. 

Can you see the Superman logo shape? I baked cupcakes because we're too poor to pay someone else to make something fancy. haha This is what I really wanted. Too bad, so sad. They were yummy at least. 

I tried to be creative with naming the snacks. Eh, it was harder than I expected. The little name cards can be found here. 

Possibly my favorite decoration was this hand-made banner! I wish I could take full credit, but I hardly did anything to this thing other than hanging it up. I got the idea from Pinterest (of course) and a template for the letters came from here. This made my life so much easier. I used the poster board I bought from Dollar Tree for everything, and had a student assistant at my work cut them all out for me. HA!

The whole setup.. ahh, lovely :) For the food table I put a blue table cloth on bottom, and a red on top (because they weren't really big enough to cover the whole table anyway, and this looked cooler than just one color alone). I should have taken a better picture of them, but at least you can see the blue poking out a little bit. 

I thought it would be fun (okay maybe not fun, just cool) to have a picture of my son hanging up for family and friends to sign. I took a picture of him at the park with my old worn out camera and had the Media Services Department where I work blow it up to to size 16x20. $3.84!!

I'm such an awful photographer! But here's his gift table... "Super Presents." It's our coffee table covered in a plastic table cloth. Fancy. (And that boring brown present on the right? Yeah... that's from us. I used packing paper I dug out of the recycling bin at work. Hey, it was better than the pink cupcake wrapping paper I had at home! He didn't seem to mind...)

My shy little birthday boy in his Superman outfit! (bought here)

I just love those house shoes he has on lol Santa Claus got those for him for Christmas. How convenient!

Opening up one of his super gifts!

After all that partying... the birthday boy was SPENT. He played and played and then passed out and didn't wake up for 3 hours.

Even Superman takes naps. 

Planning his birthday party and decorating for it was So. Much. FUN. Seriously, I love doing that kind of stuff. I started weeks ahead of time and got lots of help from my student assistants at work and, of course, my wonderful hubs. After the party was over I really didn't want to take everything down. All that hard work in the trash!?!? We did keep his birthday banner though. In fact... it's still hanging in our dining room. ;)