Webkinz Birthday Party (9 years)

For my daughter's birthday this year she was wanting to do a horse theme again (6th Birthday), and I was hoping for something different. So I scouted the ideas at Birthdaypartyideas.com. I just love their website. It is a conglomeration of other people's ideas, all in one spot. So many many themes to choose from! We saw the Webkinz theme and she jumped right on that one. We had so much fun coming up with which games we would play at her party, we did quite a few and could have done so many more. I must say, it sure is nice that her birthday is in early fall, makes it easier to do a few outside things.

We only do friend birthday parties every other year, so this year was just a family party, but she had her brother and 4 cousins, so there were still plenty of kids.

I did not get any birthday invitations made this year. Unfortunately my brother unexpectedly passed away a few weeks before my daughter's birthday, so we were very busy with funeral arrangements and grieving. Thankfully though we were able to get lots done and have a nice birthday for her, amidst the sadness.

There is not really any Webkinz themed party stuff, at least that I could find or for a decent price, so we just went with fun animal stuff.

I had an old Wilton cake pan I had picked up at a thrift store and found the directions online and modified it a bit more to our liking. We made a shag frosting, added spots where she wanted, used black jelly beans for eyes and nose, licorice whip mouth, and jolly rancher chew tongue and tag. We just made her a W (for Webkinz) to go on the tag.

We made lots of animal themed cupcakes (just scoured google images for ideas, before pinterest ha!). We used some tinted frosting and lots of goodies for the accents, thin mint type cookies, marshmallows, tootsie rolls, jolly rancher chews, skittles, gummy life savers, colored coconut (owls and chicks), licorice string, and more.

We bought Zoo Pals plates and cups. The Zoo Pals line has a Webkinz look to it. All that I could find was the farm line, but it worked. :)

The games were so fun, both making and playing! I think (at least for my kids) a lot of the birthday fun comes with their helping prepare everything. I think they will have more memories of making things for their party than of the party itself. On that note, not all turned out how I would have done it, but my daughter had fun, and gained confidence in her abilities, and it really was just perfect!

As we waited for all of our guests to arrive we had pipe cleaners and alphabet beads to make collars for our Webkinz animals. We had told each of the kids to bring their Webkinz or a small stuffed animal. This actually went much better than I expected. Her new step cousin (10) made at least 6 collars. :) It was great spelling practice too, and one package of beads went a very long way!

We tried to pick the Webkinz games that are my children's favorites.

Of course we needed to have a little mining. 

Luckily my twins had just moved into new carseats, so we had two large carseat boxes to work with. We taped the two boxes together with packing tape, and made a curve in it, so it fit in the corner, and made it more exciting and dark (after the party we opened both ends and my twins played in it for weeks until it collapsed! ha ha!). We bought some jewels at the craft store and wrapped them in aluminum foil in the stalactite shape.

Then the kids took turns taping the stalactites to the ceiling, and we covered it with a big brown blanket. My daughter made a sign for the mine, of course she chose the "Howling Horse Mine". She LOVES horses and of her 10 webkinz, I think 8 are horses. (Grandma is generous and usually buys her one for each birthday and Christmas). Anyhow, we also made some stalactites without any jewels in them, to be true to the game. We let each child have a turn to go in and pick three stalactites and come back out. They then opened them and saw what they got. Most got 2 jewels. Then once everyone had a turn we let them go back for seconds. We had small crowns we found at Zurcher's that we made our Crown of Wonder, so we had glue dots ready to attach the jewels to our crowns.

The premise of Webkinz is to play games and earn "KinzCash". So that set the stage for our party as well. Each game played gave the kids a certain amount of gold, and in the end we had a "W store" that they could purchase things from. I bought a lot of fake gold coins to be our "KinzCash". And then decided from there how much each game would be worth. I did run out of a little money in the end and needed to have some kids cash in, but it worked out fine.

What Webkinz party would be complete without a Wheel of Wow? I tried doing multiple image searches to find a Wheel of Wow that was blank, but did not have much luck. So I used one and modified it as much as my limited photo editing skills would allow. I just put colored boxes over the things we did not want on ours.  (I still need to get those uploaded, but they are still stored on our old computer, hopefully this week I can get them uploaded here for your usage)

Most of the online suggestions said to use a Lazy Susan for the Wheel of Wow, but I do not have one, and did not even know where to find one. The other suggestion was a Salad Spinner, which again, I did not have. Thankfully I was at Ross and they had one for about $6, I decided it was worth it because I wanted to try some paint projects with a salad spinner as well. So we just printed out our Wheel of Wow and wrote what you could win on there. We had some kinzcash amounts (we did change the amounts to match the coinage we had), gak (jello cup), a Webkinz outfit, and some pretend webkinz sized food.

 My daughter is not a huge fan of Operation Gumball, but I like it (do you ever get sucked into playing your kids games to earn them more points, cash, etc? lol). And it was a fun party game. We just had a small gumball machine from the $Store and a place to write down your guess. I worked hard in my print shop program (still familiarizing myself with Elements) to make it look just like the one on the game. We just gave each person one guess, and the winner received another mini gumball machine. We also had a JellyBean guess, since that is one of my daughter's favorites, same idea, used the back side of the same paper. :)

Lily Padz

This was a super simple game, but everyone liked it. We found some cheap little plastic frogs in the party section at Wal-Mart, and my daughter cut out four lily pad shapes and placed the lily pads on a blue sheet (the water). The kids stood on a marked line and tossed the frogs. They received 5 Kinzcash for the frog landing on the lily pad, and 3 if it was near it. Everyone wanted at least 2 turns.

Dr. Quack's Assistant

Miss B. drew a webkinz-ish horse, and left it white (that is her favorite horse), wrote the title of the game on the poster board and taped it on the window. We drew a few wounds (bumps and scrapes) on the horse. We bought a box of colored band-aids at the $store and tied a scarf around a child's head. The child then had to place a band-aid as close to or on the wound to win more kinzcash. Again, each child wanted more than one turn.

Whack Wacky

We just made a simple Wacky out of yellow felt with some felt face accents. Again, my artistic little girl made this with very little help from me. We stuffed him, but he was so light that when we tested the game it wasn't working well, he just didn't fly hard enough once hit. So we added some rocks to him for extra weight. The kids got three hits each to see how far they could hit him. We got out the measuring tape and measured the distance and gave a few kinzcash per foot he traveled. It was fairly difficult for the kids to throw him up in the air and hit him, so it wasn't just three swings, but three actual hits.

Wacky Pinata

I was somewhat slow on getting the pinata started on this one, so it was crunch time. However, Wacky was a very easy pinata to make. (Here is my favorite pinata recipe; for my method click here). I kept trying more and more paint, but the newspaper kept showing through, so I decided spray paint would get it done quickly. 

Bad. 

Idea. 

He looked great and Miss B. painted his face on and we added some construction paper arms and legs. Everyone had a turn to hit Wacky, my 18 year old nephew was the one to finally break it. But we were slightly somewhat sorely disappointed to find that the candy had a terrible smell of spray paint. Thankfully I had more candy left over. And we also put a lot of KinzCash and a few other small items in the pinata. 

My husband is always such a good sport to hold the pinata!

The party culminated in everyone shopping at the W Shop. 

I had boxes for everyone to make their own webkinz room. I bought bankers boxes with lids. 

We used felt squares for carpet. I had grand ideas of cutting carpet scraps from some old carpet we have, but with so much else going on, there was just not time.  There was also scrapbook paper to choose for wall paper. Other items in the W Shop were, of course, clothes. We just bought teddy bear clothes at the $store. They did not fit perfectly, but well enough. And the $store actually had some really cute selections, a few dresses, golf outfits, policemen, fireman, army, etc. They all had little accessories as well. I think we also had more jewels for sale, and some small pretend food and dishes. All the kids left with a lot of stuff and seemed very happy!