Plants Vs Zombies Birthday Party!

June is a big birthday month for our family! We have kids birthday's on the 1st, 6th, 10th, & 14th and mine on the 12th! So 5 of our birthdays are in the first 2 weeks!  Unfortunately my 2 of the birthday's are my husband's kids and since their mom has kidnapped them we are unable to celebrate theirs with them.  But for Brady & Jordan we chose to have a combined birthday party this year since they both wanted a Plants Vs Zombies party!  Kill 2 birds (or in this case Zombies) with one stone?!?! heck yea I'm down for that!  So here's what we did-
I found out quickly that there are NO and I mean NO Plants vs Zombies birthday items you can buy!!!  This market definitely needs to be explored by POP CAP games!!  Seriously the only things you can even buy are: shirts, (the game of course), stickers if you order them from ebay and have time to wait for them to be shipped, and if you're lucky you can find a stuffed toy.  THAT's IT!

So this meant it was time for my creative mom hat.  This also means the party will probably cost me less too so I guess that's a bonus!

Each boy wanted a different invitation to give out so they each helped me design these invites.  I uploaded them to Walmart.com and got them printed for about 19 cents each.

To start off- we purchased 2 white posters and 2 thick white boards (these are about 1/2 inch thick and sturdy).
I printed off some pictures of plants vs zombies and then just sketched them by eye and painted them on the white boards.  The two thick boards we then cut holes out and I sewed some small bean bags for a bean bag toss game.

This zombie poster we made for a red light/green light game where the winner was the first one to touch it.  We were going to do a pin the cone/bucket/helmet on the zombie game but I didn't get the things to pin on finished in time.

The boys wanted these posters all hung up in their room after the party so they are now room decorations for them!

We then played Plants vs Zombies dodge ball having one team the plants and the other team the Zombies.  We bought some green balls about 8-10" big at the store and used those.

Since it was super hot we had a bucket of ice with mini water bottles that I had printed some Plants vs Zombie stickers on and Capri-Sun drinks.

When ordering the cupcakes we ran into the same problem of no plants vs zombies stuff!  So I had the store make chocolate cupcakes (dirt) and frost the tops to look like grass.  Then I made (or at least attempted to make) some sunflower toppers. (these didn't hold up too well in the heat!)
The toppers were made using a mini Nella wafers as the base, then almond bark colored yellow melted and made into petals, then chocolate decorator frosting for the face.  Make them on some waxed paper on a cookie sheet then place in the freezer to set up.

I thought about printing off some more pictures and sticking them back to back with a tooth pick in the middle and using them as cupcake toppers but ended up doing the sunflowers instead.

We decorated with a bunch of red balloons that we had drawn the face on like the balloon zombie from the game.

For the goodie bags I got these little box/bags at the dollar store- they were 12 for $1.  Then I printed up a sticker that said "Thanks for coming to Jordan & Brady's Party!  Enjoy your dirt dessert"  Inside the bags we put 1 chocolate pudding cup, a mini Ziploc bag with 2 Oreo's and 2 gummy worms.  We then tied one of the red balloons to the top.

Other ideas that we didn't do:

• A pea shooting contest- using frozen peas and a straw (has to be a thick straw)
• Brains for lunch- Ramen noodles
• Watermelon toss- see who can throw it the furthest- OR use a small one to toss back and forth between 2 people, each taking a step back after catching it each time until someone drops it.
• Newspaper catch- each kid has a newspaper (like the zombie) and tries to catch a water balloon with it.  The one to catch the most wins.

*update- if you're a big fan of Plants vs Zombies check out my classroom decoration ideas