What to do when he asks for a K’nex birthday party and I just have no idea?
When Levi threw me this curve ball (in the form of a birthday party I could not find much for on Pinterest), it left me with a single idea: practicality. What can the boys do to build this birthday party from scratch?
Fortunately for us, we already had a large collection of K’nex structures on hand. All I had to do was come up with a cake to accent their work, along with some clever party food labels (because party food labels remain a favorite birthday request amongst our children). So… what goes with a K’nex Roller Coaster?
A roller coaster cake!
We all know I’m no baker, but I love to build cakes for our children. Usually, our birthday cakes come in the form of Sara Lee Pound Cakes because a) pound cakes retain their shape well, making it easier to construct strange shapes, and b) I generally try to avoid baking as much as possible. This time, though, I decided to go way overboard and bake a box cake mix because I needed round cakes. So… the equation looked sort of like this:
two boxes of Pillsbury cake mix + ~ 3 tubs of icing + half a plastic (red) tablecloth as my building platform…
+ Pull-Apart Twizzlers
= a roller coaster cake!
My original plan was to create trusses with pretzel sticks, but I ran out of time. Plus, Levi told me it was finished *just like this,* so we propped up a few of the taller roller coaster hills with skewers and shifted our focus to other food stuff. The real hit wasn’t the roller coaster cake, anyway, but what the boys added to it: K’nex, Lego, Technic, and robots. Our home was (and still is) overrun by boy-built creations.
Because there just isn’t a whole lot of variety with K’nex pieces (connectors and rods, mostly), I decided to broaden the scope for our food labels. Because our children use K’nex to build machines, we went with a Simple Machines theme.
The menu:
Gears = Fudge Stripe Cookies & Oreos
Wheels = Miniature Donuts
Screws = Fritos Twist Honey BBQ Corn Chips
Ball Bearings = Grapes
Rods & Levers = Mixture of Pretzel sticks & Veggie Sticks
Wedges = Doritos
Connectors = Cheetos Snowflakes (probably a temporary seasonal thing)
And in case anyone else has a child who throws a birthday-party curve ball like this one, I’ve included the party food labels here for easy download! (Note: There are more food labels in this packet than what we actually used.) Click here to download.
After our piñata tradition…
it was time for presents.
What a gift this boy has been to our family! Levi loves to build things and collects all sorts of treasures (aka, trash). He’s thoughtful, helpful, and sensitive. And he’s an enthusiastic outdoorsman, scientist, inventor, and nature explorer. It’s certainly an adventure being his mother!
To see our other birthday party ideas (Minecraft, Garfield, Spy, Mario, Star Wars, LEGO, Monster Truck, and Construction-Themed), click here.