Crunchy Crafty Crazy: Spy School Birthday Party

I would love to say it was super easy to put together C’s 5th Birthday party because I do this sort of thing all the time. BUT when it came time to plan, I was buried in life and work and I had a hard time getting all the details in order. To be honest, the only reason I did a big party was because it’s my business- and it’s good for my portfolio. :-)

Here we go. C is into spies and I decided on a “Spy School” theme. The kids came and went through some basic training and earned their certificate at the end. It turned out to be a lot of fun!

We had the party at the church so I had one sign downstairs to lead everyone up.

And this was the welcome sign for the door. I had just gotten a new printer so I can now print 11”x17” signs!

For the invitation- I made a little “folder” and had these pages cut apart and paper clipped in the folder. I ran the envelopes through the printer and printed “top secret” on the outside.

Banner above the present table at the entry

We had nametags for everyone to work on when they got there. On the back, they got a sticker for every training mission they completed.

Here’s our nametag table setup.

We are about to get a bit out of order- because these pictures are seriously hard to re-arrange.

I’m not type A so it doesn’t bother me…. hopefully it won’t bother you.

So we had a series of missions they had to complete. One of them was Language school (okay, so I needed another mission, I stretched it a bit)

We taught the kids how to say hello in a few languages and count and some other things. I’ve watched Dora a few times so I know some Spanish and I almost failed French in college and I’ve been to Portugal twice so I’m pretty sure they learned a lot.

Actually all they did was ask when dinner was. #fail

Speaking of dinner, the spies in training came to the cafeteria at spy school for dinner.

I found these adorable paper cafeteria trays online and HAD to have them so that actually determined the theme of the whole dinner.

Here’s all the kids eating with their cute cafeteria trays.

The kids are cute too.

Here’s some of the very simple food. I usually like to do homemade food with new recipes and lots of ingredients… but I just didn’t have it in me this year.

The Cake! I just got a simple cake at target with sprinkles on the edge and added the rest of the decorations myself.

You should have heard the Target baker when she was taking my order- “is that all?” “would you like anything else on the cake?” “anything at all…”

One of their missions was to dress up in disguises and we took some fun pictures.

Disguise table.

The kiddos had fun!

C with his sweet aunt Caylin who came all the way from Houston for the party.

Another mission- driving school!

I didn’t get any good pictures of this one. They were moving too fast!

Everyone’s favorite mission- Laser training.

I was hoping it would be everyone’s favorite activity because it looks just like an awesome spy movie and it took Mike an hour to put it together. But it turns out it was their favorite because there was candy at the back and they just loved to go through the maze and grab candy.

Over and over and over.

I even had a spot for the grown ups to relax since they work so hard.

My family sure did enjoy it.

It’s a good thing I didn’t PAY them to help.

For the last mission of the day they had to pop balloons and find the secret message and it took them downstairs and look for the next clue and the next clue.