Rocco's 5th Birthday - A Super Mario Party

Here's another very belated birthday post from last year. We're getting ready for our 6th birthday party coming up next month so I thought it was finally time to post last year's party! 

Our theme last year was Super Mario Brothers which is probably better suited for kids eight and up. Rocco couldn't really play the Mario games at the time but he really liked going through the game booklets and eventually started asking us to play the games so he could watch them like cartoons.

Since most five year olds aren't into Super Mario Brothers yet, I went with a cuter and more modern style Mario invitation which I ordered from T3DesignsCo on Etsy. Mario originally had an "M" on his hat but I changed it to an "R" for "Super Rocco." 

For our drink/dessert table, I did a small cake topped with a Mario and Yoshi cookie, vanilla "mushroom" cupcakes, chocolate goomba cupcakes, piranha plant (a.k.a. chomping flower) cake pops on Rice Krispie pots, flower power cookies, and power star cookies.

Power Star Cookies (below)

Flower Power Cookies (below)

For the food label stands, I used Lego 4 x 12 plates with K'nex Super Mario figures just like what I had done for the previous year's Ninjago party which you can see here. If you haven't already noticed, the labels got mixed up between the power star cookies and the flower power cookies. Whoopsie!

The water bottle labels and mustache straw designs below are from whirligigspartyco on Etsy.

One of our games was a fire ball toss which we built a castle backdrop for. The kids had to throw fireballs at the bad guys which were attached to the castle with a hinge so that they fell back when hit with a fireball.

Our fireballs were tennis balls wrapped with fire print fabric.

We also did the goomba stomp game. We printed goomba eyes on label paper, cut them out (which took forever), and stuck them to brown balloons.

Here's Rocco coming out of a warp pipe. We were lucky to get some free samples of paper tubes from a local paper tube manufacturer. To round off and soften up the tops of the tubes, we added some foam and covered them with green tape.

I made my first attempt at a homemade piñata and made a Bowser piñata. I started by making the head using five small balloons (I eventually ended up changing the back balloon to a larger balloon).

Then I attached another larger balloon to the bottom for the body.

 Here he is covered in newspaper.

I cut a hole out of the back of the head for the candy.

His nose wasn't big enough so I added more tissue to the front.

The spikes were card stock stuffed with tissue paper.

And here's Bowser in his ship. We repurposed our pirate ship wagon from our pirate party and turned it into Bowser's ship by adding a felt Bowser logo to the ship's sail.

Here's the Bowser piñata in action.

Finally, we sent all the kiddos home with question mark favor boxes which I got from here. The favor boxes included some Super Mario stickers, Super Mario Kart candy dispensers, a Super Mario K'nex mystery figure, and Super Mario fruit snacks.

To make the power star balloons, I printed eyes on label paper and attached them to mylar star balloons.

Happy Fifth Birthday Rocco!