Brenner's Mario Bros Birthday party!

My baby boy turned 6 this week.  So while I struggled with thought of having a 6 and 8 year old I also got to struggle to get things ready for his party this weekend.  Thank goodness my parents volunteered to have the party at their house so we could use the pool.  Unfortunately my stepmom didn't remember this and also planned their annual summer garage sale for this weekend.  Great.  I got to add the garage sale struggle to the ever growing pile for the week.  Did I mention that I worked last Saturday night, Monday and Tuesday day, and Wednesday evening?  No?  Yup, the week kept getting better and better.

So we got nothing done on our list this week.  I'm not even sure I had time to pee.  But everything came together and we had a fantastic party!

A lot of the ideas I found on Pinterest.  I adapted some to fit what I wanted to do and some I changed not at all. I picked everything that would be the simplest to do and give the best effect.  So we made chocolate mustaches and marshmallow mushroom pops, played pin the mustache on Mario, had sandwiches, pretzels, and Mario fruit snacks to eat, and had a green pipe cake with a pirahna plant decoration on it.  The goodie 'bags' were gold '?' boxes with bubble gum coins in them. I used solid color plates, napkins, cups, and plasticware. My stepmom provided the baskets and buckets.

I made the mustaches with candy melts and a couple of molds I got on ebay.  I used the extra sticks from that and stuck marshmallows on them.  I dipped those in red candy melts and dotted them with white chocolate the next day.  I found the gold boxes and bubble gum coins at Oriental Trading and just drew the question marks on with a sharpie. I adapted an idea I found here for the cake.  The cake itself is just 3 6in round cakes topped with an 8in round cake and covered in green tinted carmel buttercream (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla extract and carmel extract). 

The pin the mustache on Mario game was homemade.  I found a picture of Mario's face and copied it onto a piece of cardboard.  I then drew a mustache to fit onto another piece of cardboard and trace enough so each kid would have one chance. We used duct tape to stick them to the face. The birthday boy though it would be a lot more fun to throw the mustaches at the face, but we convinced him that wouldn't work nearly as well as walking up and placing it where he wanted it.

We had planned to do egg races using hard boiled eggs that my boys had drawn spots on with sharpie in the different yoshi colors (green, yellow, blue, and pink).  Unfortunately it was just too hot out and the kids were much happier in the pool anyway.  My husband used them to make a very large batch of egg salad today instead.

Everyone had a fantastic time, even this stressed out mom.  Because once I had things done and set up I let everyone else run the show and sat back with my camera and one of these.