Day 1194 - Camouflage Themed Birthday Party

What to do when your son wants a Halo party.

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Darby is fully 100% into Halo.  For those of you without X-Box enthusiasts under your roof, Halo is a multi-billion dollar science fiction  game of combat where humans are at war with aliens.  I am very nervous about gun games for kids, so the rule in our house is the game must not have any blood splatter and we don't kill animals or humans, but we can shoot at aliens or robots.  (Until such time as aliens and robots become active friendly members of our society and then we'll have to ban that too.)



While I'd prefer not to do guns at all, I'd like to remain flexible given his friends and cousins play these games.  I don't want to alienate him (excuse the pun). We just talk about it to ensure he understands the difference between gaming and reality.  Like with angry birds ... it's fun ... but never ever throw a bird at a pig. It's just wrong.

Anyway (a bit of a diversion there for some self-coverage) it's Darby's birthday this week and yesterday was his party. He wanted a Halo theme.  Well, how did I manage that?

The Invitation

The party started with a game of Halo. We had two X-boxes set up in two different rooms of the house (we borrowed his cousin's X-Box and controllers) with a cord between them to system link.  That way we could have all eight kids involved in the game at the same time.  They played that for about an hour which gave them all a feel for the theme and got them ready for some good old fashioned solider action.

From there I took a KIA full of kids to the local pool for a sausage sizzle lunch and a cool down. They got to burn some energy so that the Nerf fight at home wouldn't be quite as energetic and testosterone driven as it may have been otherwise.  I mean, this war was taking place indoors so I needed some semblance of control.

Then we came back home ready to get our Halo on.  (I use the term "we" very loosely.  I did not participate in the fighting. I just refereed occasionally.)

After the war (which lasted an hour) we got ready for cake.  Now this is where I got a bit nervous a few days ago wondering what I had signed up for.  I mean, how does one do a Halo cake? I couldn't do the X-Box controller because I already did that last year.  I didn't want to do a cake shaped like a gun.  It felt wrong.  So instead, I did a camouflage theme.  While not strictly Halo, I felt it was somewhat Halo-esque.  Maybe?

(C) Deep Fried Fruit

(C) Deep Fried Fruit

(C) Deep Fried Fruit

I went to our local party shop - The Party Hive - for some inspiration, and came home with a packet of plastic soldiers, a plastic camo table cloth, napkins, cups and lolly bags.  They had camo paper plates as well (in the shape of t-shirts) but I had already blown my budget.  I added some swirly green balloons as the centre piece.  Then I did the cheats birthday cake and went for cupcakes.  Red velvet cakes in yellow cupcake cases, with green cream-cheese icing, and a soldier on top.

After we did cake and sang happy birthday it was time to hand out the gift bags. Just handing them over wasn't enough ... the kids had to work for their loot.  How? With a treasure hunt of course! I wrote about our treasure hunts here last week. This was the treasure hunt to top all treasure hunts.  To find the clues the boys were going out the front yard, out the back yard, up the stairs, down the stairs, into bedrooms, bathrooms, garden shed, laundry. They were on chairs reaching up to curtain rods, and on their hands and knees searching for clues.  They had to be careful though! There were snipers about (in the form of Tahlia and cousin Jess with Nerf guns).  They finally found the loot .... in the cupboard with the dog food (yum).

Loot bags consisted of lollies, chocolates, a "Trashie", a dog tag each and the two soldiers from their table setting.  The "Trashie" was not in theme. They're just popular collectibles at the moment so I added one each for good measure.

It was a fun party, but throughout I had a niggling fear that my theme may have been politically incorrect.

Would you ever have a gun-themed party?  

Was I being too "light-hearted" about war?

What was your last kids party theme?