Bionicle Hero Birthday Party

My son turned 13 years old on Sunday; he asked for a "Bionicles Hero" party.  Since I don't watch TV or movies, I'm  glad the internet could help me figure out what he was talking about!  It also helped me design suitable invitations.

We had about a dozen kids over for three hours.  The idea to serve individual pizzas flopped when I couldn't find a source of cheap, small pizza trays, so the boys and I made two large pizzas for the crowd.  That and popcorn for the movie were the dinner.

Oh, the movie.  A trip to our public library earlier this week netted three DVDs:  movies featuring Bioncles, Green Lantern, and X-men.  The kids watched part of the Bionicles together before deciding our basketball net and tree house were more fun after all.

We made the cake from scratch and decorated it with blue and red frosting (my daughter helped with the batter and described it as "a bowl of diabetes").  I used to be  control freak who decorated the cakes myself, but I'm now a control freak who hands the icing over to my sons and leaves the room so I don't fuss at them constantly.  I come to touch up at the end.  What the cake lacked in elegance, it made up for in altitude.  Putting it up high on a "mountain" of red buckets and decorating with my son's bionicles gave it enough 'wow' to conceal our pitiful lack of skill.

I often worry that I'm so weird that my kids will suffer socially for it, so this party was a little test for me.  We played a few funky party games (picking up my husband off the floor, and "mouse").  Three hours after the kids first arrived, the parents started showing up to take them home.  Some of the parents played  a round or two of "mouse" with us, and the kids begged to be allowed to stay longer . . . I was really happy.