Rockets and aliens

We just had our first real kids birthday party on the weekend. The big monster turned three and since he really likes anything that has to do with rocket ships, we went for a space themed party.

The first thing towards preparation was making and writing the party invitations. Yannick’s patience for cutting and gluing pieces lasted about half way through the first one, but conveniently Emmanuel and Juliette are brother and sister, so we only needed one and Mama was nice enough to finish it herself.

As my parents are currently visiting, I also got some great help with the decorations. One evening a few days ago Oma and I made a little banner. Opa pointed out that the aliens looked like frogs, but I like the happy little guys.

Every good party needs exciting food, and a space party obviously needs a rocket cake. I challenged myself by creating my own puzzle: how to build a rocket out of a standard round cake, ideally with no waste? Pen, paper, scissors and 15 min later I came up with a solution. Not so bad, eh?! 😎

For a moment I was worried that the actual pieces of the slightly dome shaped cake wouldn’t fit together quite as nicely, but to my surprise they did (I only minimally trimmed the upper two corners of the central square for a smoother transition between the main body and the wings)!

And look how nice the rocket looked once it was decorated!

I used some of the leftover blueberry cream to cover some of the matching alien cup cakes, but I had made way too much and we still have more of it in the fridge – maybe we’ll have some trifles later this week to use it up. The rest of the aliens got yellow and blue-green faces and of course, they all needed eyes.

In order to dress everybody up in matching party outfits I got some plain t-shirts and decorated them with even more rockets and aliens. I was pleased to see that the kids really liked them and also just loved the idea of having something that would outlast the party, like a souvenir of some sort.

And of course, the t-shirts came in appropriate packaging:

For more fun activities, I spray painted some empty water bottles and duct taped them together in pairs. Some elastic straps and paper napkins as fire et voilà, some quick and easy jet packs were ready. We did have to show the kids a short YouTube clip as an introduction, but then they were running around the house with their flying gear. Only blurry pictures though, sorry… 😉

A few months ago, long before planning this party, I also had the idea of making a big boys quilt for Yannick’s birthday. However, since I tend to have a lot more plans than time, it is far from being finished. At least the design is mostly ready and I have all the materials. And I even started working on the very first few quilt blocks. But this project is worth its own post, so here are just two of the blocks. Click on the picture below for more pretty cool rocket quilt blocks!

Anyway, I think it was a rather good party and I’m pretty sure you can guess that I had just as much fun as the kids. 😉 But I’m also glad that the next birthday is six months away… 😉

UPDATE (11th April 2022):

The rocket and flying saucer quilt blocks are now available as a quilt pattern, see below!