My boys LOVE Mario! What is it about this little plumber guy in overalls that we love so much? I am not sure, but I do know this… This is the second year in a row that my 5 year old has asked for a Mario Birthday party. 🙂 We did one for him when he turned 4. Apparently he had such a good time the first time that he thought we should do it a second time. We did not, but I thought I would mention it so you can get an understanding of what I am dealing with here.
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It’s amazing to me that Mario is still a thing honestly! I mean, I played Mario when I was too young to spell Mario. They keep cranking out new Mario and Luigi video games and kids (and adults) keep buying them. Did you know that there are over 200 Mario games created?! Is that insane or what? Mario first showed up in 1981 in an arcade video game called Donkey Kong and since then Mario now holds the title of best-selling video game franchise in history, with over 262 million combined units sold. Mario is not going anywhere.
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This year in preschool the teacher asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. They wrote out what the kids said on a chalkboard, framed it, and sent it home to the parents. My five year old’s picture looked like this:
He wants to be Mario when he grows up.
We dream big in our house. 🙂
We dream big in our house. 🙂
Happy birthday banner
I looked all over pinterest in preparation for our Mario party, and here are some of the things I found that I loved so much I recreated them myself. I found printable decorations and games and used several of them. One of the banners that I found was this adorable one from Redfly Creations:
I liked this idea because it was simple, bright and cheerful. I printed off the printable letters and Mario head, and punched holes in each one, and hung it with string. My son got really excited when he saw me putting this together.
Mario and Luigi party invitations
The invitation I made out of construction paper was inspired by Andrea Templeman’s invitations at It’s the Life. She used a cricket when she made hers. I don’t have a cricket so I got out some good old construction paper and scissors.
Here is what Andrea’s version of this invite looked like, using the cricket. Aren’t they cute?…
Another great idea for a Mario birthday party invitation that I loved (but didn’t use) is this one that looks like a DS game from Paper Creations by Silvana:
Super Mario Snack Ideas
If your kids are into Mario these next Mario party snack ideas will make sense to you. I found this picture on pinterest and it became my source of inspiration for the snacks at our party.
This one picture helped me so much. I looked at this picture and thought to myself, “I think I could actually make some of those!” I didn’t attempt Goomba, but I tried some of the others. Mine did not turn out quite as cute, but hey! I tried. 🙂
Here are the ingredients I used to make the snacks that I made:
FIRE BALL SNACKS
Our cheese puff snacks were in a bowl. Nothing fancy…I just wanted to have an extra snack on the snack table. We called them fire balls.
SUPER MUSHROOM SNACK
This snack is made using string cheese and cherry tomatoes. I used toothpicks to hold them together and I used sprinkles that we already had in the cupboard for eyes, but I think the original idea was to use poppy seeds. I recommend poppy seeds. 🙂
YOSHI’S EGG SNACK
This one was great. I hard-boiled a bunch of eggs, cut pieces of spinach into circles and called it a snack. In order to get the eggs to lay flat I cut a little piece of the egg off to make a flat part of the egg.
I got the spinach circles a little wet and they stuck to the eggs just fine.
FIRE FLOWER SNACK
For this snack you start by coring out the middle of a cucumber. Then slicing it and cutting the rings in half.
Then cut the strawberries in half. Again, fennel seeds would have been great here, but I used mini chocolate chips for the eyes instead. I stuck a toothpick through the strawberry and then through the cucumber to hold the fire flower snack together.
SUPER STAR SNACKS
Our super stars snacks were actually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into stars. And again, fennel seeds would have made great eyes, but we had raisins, so I used raisins.
My mother-in-law bought the Birthday cake for us. It was a regular store-bought cake, but we washed some Mario figurines and put them on the cake.
Mario Party Game Ideas
I was leading the games so I did not do a very good job of taking pictures of the games.
I found a star pinata so I bought it and put two black ovals on it for eyes.
I made a picture of Mario and a bunch of mustaches and we did pin the mustache on Mario.
My husband made a CD with lots of Mario songs on it and we played musical chairs.
We took pictures of the Mario characters and made a Bingo board and bingo cards to play Mario Bingo. We used gold coins to cover up the pictures. We just pulled these back out since I was creating this post and it reminded me that we still had them. My son has been playing with them all day.
Mario and Luigi costumes
Kipton was Mario for Halloween one year and my older son was Luigi so we already had a Mario and Luigi costume laying around in our house. Kipton wore his Mario costume for the party. The other day he got the costumes back out when his friend came over. The Mario costume doesn’t fit quite like it used to, but that didn’t stop them. 🙂
Long live Mario!
May you live to entertain many more generations to come! 🙂
Thanks to Andrea Templeman for the invitation idea.
Thanks to Obentomomma.com for some of the snack ideas.
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