M's Busytown Birthday!

M turned four this week and I can't really justify calling him "Baby M" any longer, so from here on out it's just "M".  For his fourth birthday party we decided to do a "Busytown" theme.  M loves the Richard Scarry books and is a bit obsessed with the show Busytown Mysteries.  Now every year I say I'm going to make it easy on myself and just take M to PartyCity and make him pick out a pre-packaged theme, but I just can't bring myself to do it.  I spend too much time looking at sites like ohdeeoh and Pinterest and keep forgetting that I am not that crafty or patient.

Case in point: here is the inspiration for one of our party activities

and here is how it actually turned out

You will notice I did not get out my jigsaw and fiberboard to create the cutouts.  In fact, I did not even bother to cover up the copy on cereal boxes.  Minus 1 for me, I should have at least glued some construction paper on the back of the boxes.

Anyway, if you are looking for the gold standard of Busytown Birthday parties, check out this post over on stitch/craft.  It's a really beautiful party. But if you are looking for some ideas that the average, lazier, Type-B parent can pull off you have come to the right place.

We had our party outside at a local park, so we didn't have a lot of decorations.  We had the "town" and figures for the kids to play with.  I photocopied the pages out of What Do People Do All Day and The Adventures of Lowly Worm, glued them to the back of cereal boxes and stuck them on the end of the table.  I purchased the figures online; we had Huckle, Sally, Lowly, Mr. Fixit, Hilda Hippo, Pig Will and Bananas Gorilla.  I put out a few of our Richard Scarry books so that guests who weren't familiar with Busytown would have some context.  We had crayons and coloring pages from the Hello Busytown! coloring book for guests as well.  Although I must admit none of these activities were nearly as popular as the Stomp Rockets that we decided to bring along at the last minute.  No connection to Busytown, but the kids were lining up to launch them while the coloring pages blew around in the wind.

When it was time for cake we surprised our guests with a mystery.  We gathered everyone around the table and then opened the cake box to reveal not a cake, but a picture of Goldbug with a note that read

It's the Mystery of the Missing Birthday Cake!

It's a Busytown Mystery just for you!  To find your cake follow the clues!  

For your first clue, ask where would Lowly go?  He likes to play tic, tac toe

At first the kids were a little confused, but we had rehearsed this game with M a few weeks prior to the party so he knew what was going on.  He led all of his friends over to the Tic Tac Toe board in the park where a friend of ours was waiting with a picture of Lowly and another clue.  The kids had to go to 4 different locations in the park and eventually ended up back at the table where we had the actual cake waiting for them.  I wasn't sure if this game would work, but it ended up being lots of fun and I cannot tell you how cute it was to see a line of 20 kids running around the park chanting "Cake! Cake!" 

My mother-in-law is an excellent and adventurous cake maker and volunteered to make us a Huckle cake.  Since we were at the park and didn't have a cooler big enough to hide the cake she wrapped it as if it was a present and hid it in plain view.  When the lid was removed the sides fell down to reveal the cake.  (My mother-in-law probably could pull off an ohdeedoh worthy party).

In our favor bags we had mini magnifying glasses, little notebooks that I decorated with Busytown stickers (which came with the Hello Busytown! coloring book), party blowers and pretzels.  M loved his party and even his friends who had never heard of Busytown had a great time.

Baby M is 1 Year Old -- That's WILD!

Baby M is 1 year old. I know I am supposed to say, "I can't believe it's been a year already" but it really does seem like it has been a year since we brought him home from the hospital. Yes the last few months have flown by, but I remember back to last year when we measured Baby M's age in days and looked forward to weekly milestones that seemed to take forever to arrive. We waited for his colic to "peak" and eagerly counted up to week 8, week 10, week 12 , until finally (week 16?) he started crying a little less and smiling a little more. There were long days when I would look at the clock and think, "only 5 more hours until bedtime." Actually, there are still days that I do that.

We celebrated Baby M's first birthday last weekend with a simple party at Lindberg Park in Culver City. In Los Angeles kid birthday parties can quickly go overboard with bounce houses, petting zoos, ice sculptures, etc. I certainly had no intention of throwing that kind of party, but I did want to do something more than my typical party which consists of burgers on the grill in the back yard. Every party planning guide instructs you to start with a theme so that's where I started. Initially I proposed a theme of Asian Pop Culture. I had this crazy idea that I could somehow re-create MOCA's Murakami opening party on a 1 year old scale by shopping at Giant Robot and Mitsuwa. My husband gently suggested that this might be a little overly ambitious. So I considered a variety of other themes including Ugly Dolls (discarded after they were featured too prominently in Cookie Magazine) and Robots (discarded after a friend had a robot themed party for her toddler which included her husband dressed up as a robot in a costume that, no kidding, took him 20 hours to make) and finally settled on Where the Wild Things Are. I love this classic children's book and the mischievous little boy in the story has always reminded me of Baby M. Despite the facts that this year is author Maurice Sendak's 80th birthday and Spike Jonze is currently working on a live-action version of Where the Wild Things Are, there was very little available in the way of party decorations, favors, etc. I ended up making custom invitations and bubble labels using my computer and found an ornament from Hallmark to use as a cake topper. It wasn't a ton of work, but my tip to other slacker moms out there is to look through the party themes available at your local party store and then just choose from those. Of course, as my husband repeatedly pointed out the party was really about Baby M and our friends and family probably would have had just as much fun if the party had been themeless. Still, I am pleased that we ushered in his first year with a bit of fun and originality.