The Making of Zenon's 6th Birthday Poke-Bash

I honestly cannot recall Zenon being this persistent about what he wanted for his birthday or for anything else before. Probably because he's still young but somehow he got hooked into Pokemon. For several months he would say this, "All I want for my birthday is a Pokemon card". Of course, me being his mom (poor child!), the response he always got was, "Okay, but you get one, okay? Just one!". Thus the protest would begin until he would give out a loud sigh and surrender with these words, "I just want Pokemon for my birthday Mom, just one is fine.". Awwww, my poor baby! I win!
Many, many months of this has thus of course led to the Pokemon themed 6th birthday. Armed with a tight budget, an addiction to Pinterest and an inkling of craftiness, the making of the birthday began.
First, ideas. I'm familiar with Pokemon, the first generation came out when I was in high school. I remember my step-brother was glued to his game boy playing the game. I remember the sounds, especially the music it played when you run into a Pokemon. I remember being frustrated and irritated with that darn music. I tried understanding the game but my brother got the game straight from Japan, his Dad being Japanese and all, so the whole thing was in Japanese. It didn't help that my brother was fresh from Japan himself so he really couldn't explain much to me. Well, that given, I still ended up liking it because Pikachu was cute and the show was pretty cool.
So, given my obvious lack of Poke-knowledge, I needed to do some research. My research showed that Pokemon has become an extremely vast mass of.....I don't even have any words for it (Pokemon-ness??). It's just a lot of Pokemon amassed over more than a decade and several versions of it called generations. (Generations? Hoo, someone's getting O-L-D.) Given this, I came up with the conclusion to abandon any further research and just grab some ideas other people have had and have used with their own kids' Pokemon themed birthdays. Me = smart.
These days, where else would you get ideas but from the best source in the world -- Pinterest! Thus, began the long weekday nights and long weekend days AND nights of Pinterest (as if this wasn't a recurring activity in this household). However, let us not dismiss good ol' Google, which has also given me some awesome ideas and provided very good resources for the making if this birthday.
In the end we decided to make things easy for us -- stick to the original, the classics if you may, black, red and white, the colors of the Pokeball, which allowed us to have a color theme, too.

The Invitations
I needed to make life easy for me so I scratched my original plan of having pokeball invitations that you can either open or have a page pulled out.
So they came out like so.

I choose you!

The Banner
I saw a picture on Pinterest of a very, very cool Birthday banner where the letters had a pokeball background. Considering I was trying to spare myself from labor due to a 5K I was also putting together (for the day before Zenon's birthday!), I clicked on the pin and it directed me to a website and I found out, the banner was for sale! Yes! $35-45 for the banner, cupcake toppers, goodie bag labels, etc. Sweet deal! Then, came the most annoying catch I've ever encountered in my life thus far -- you're only paying for the PDF file so you can print everything off yourself! Amazing, and so not worth it!
So, I looked for other ideas, googled what was for sale online and decided that the banner I saw was still the best. No, I didn't buy it. Never doing that and don't fall for it either! Making your own is easy and cheap. Trust me. Especially if you invest in some awesome "equipment" called huge circle craft punch (6" diameter, I also bought a 1" one), life and the labors of love become much easier. Besides, these babies are going to be a part of my arts and crafts armament.
Now, a preview of what I came up with compared to the one from Pinterest.

Note the picture of the banner on our dining table has differed a bit from the one we put up. This is due to the fact that my son is an Ohio State fan. We cannot however change the fact that Ash wears a blue vest with yellow accents. In which case, Ash and none of his ancestors are from Michigan.

I'll post a tutorial soon enough, I hope. (Ooh, look who's making tutorials now! Look at you, you professional blogger, arts and crafts guru, you!)

The Ice Cream Bar
That aside, some other ideas I got was to have an ice cream bar. I've always wanted to have one! I mean, for Zenon to have one!
Most ice cream bar pictures I liked had some sort of sign for it so I decided to make my own. At first all I knew was it would have a picture or pictures of ice cream and the words "ice cream" somewhere. One late weekend night I had this idea of making a pokeball ice cream in a cone! Pokeballs are circles and so are ice cream scoops, make a triangle for the cone then tadaaaa!!

Another idea I got was to buy $1 fishbowls from the Dollar Tree and make poke-bowls for the ice cream toppings. So off we went to the local Dollar Tree and got 4 medium sized fishbowls. Unfortunately, despite how easy it would've been to make, I didn't have enough time to make them. I pushed the easiest things to do last but unfortunately due to all the exhaustion and stress for the past couple of months, my body finally started to succumb to illness. So instead of my nightly craft work for Zenon's birthday, I was forced to rest. I could've pushed through but I just died at the end of the day from work. Here's a picture of the poke-bowl I was going to make. I'll still try to make one for the sake of showing how easy it would've really been and how awesome, too. (*Sigh)

We didn't use ice cream cones though, we got plastic dessert cups with stems from the Dollar Tree 5pcs per pack instead. Less chances of ice cream melting through the cone and making a mess.

Poke-Lantern

Look how cool they are! Again though, a fail. I made this my second to the last thing to do right before the bowls. (*SIGH)

This one though I have a pretty good idea of how to make, but if it will be easy I'm still not sure. We still ended up using the red and white lanterns we bought from Hobby Lobby. The entry way to the clubhouse where we had Zenon's birthday was the perfect place for them.

What can I say, my kid loves the camera.

I alternated the white and red lanterns and had them arranged small-medium-large which was perfect because there were 3 lanterns per pack in these sizes. Since we were now only missing the black, we used black curling ribbon to hang them.

Welcome Trainers!
We were supposed to copy this sign and post it up to greet the guests, but would also say, "Please take a hat". Unfortunately because I was sick, missing the printer cord to the laptop and could not drive to go to UPS to have the sign printed, we had to make do with what we had that day. I asked a friend to just write it for me at last minute on the whiteboard that the clubhouse had.

The Ash Ketchum hats we ordered online. It's a good buy because it's not your typical birthday party hat and the fact that it comes undone, became an activity, too and a unique way to welcome and entertain guests.

Z-E-N-O-N spells ZENON!
Fails aside, I did make something that I did not get from google or Pinterest. I got 3D cardboard letters that spelled out Zenon's name and painted it red and white. It turned out so awesome and Zenon loves it! It's in his room as part of his decor now.

Balloons = Birthday, always.
Don't forget the balloons! We bought red, white and black balloons and just scattered them all over the floor!

Got a table? Poke-square it is!
I didn't realize how great an idea it was to have Zenon's birthday at the clubhouse until I realized that all the decorations I had in mind had a perfect place in the venue, including 1 big and 3 medium sized round tables that I never even had to move!
We covered the tables with red and white plastic table covers from the Dollar Tree, then put a strip of black crepe paper streamer in the middle, including the square table in front of the sofa which was perfect for the gifts! So we had 4 Pokeball tables and 1 Poke-square table.

Even the gift wrapping required some creativity due to lack of Pokemon gift wrappers.

Games
We only had 2 because we found a couple of DVDs for $5 each and made that part of the activities.
The first game was a pokeball hunt. The Pinterest pin I got made use of ping pong balls. I used styrofoam balls instead. These are now also adorning my son's room.
Another game that I came up with I called the PsyDuck Walk where you put a balloon between your legs and race!



The Goodie Bags
Now we go to the goodie bags. We ordered a pack of Pokemon mini-figures online for $13.99. There are 24 pcs per pack. We could have gotten it for cheaper but those shipped from China and we couldn't risk not getting them on-time. We did sign up for Amazon Prime so shipping was free.

The paper bags were from the Dollar Tree, 24 pcs per pack. The pokeball I made and glued it on the bag. We also ordered pokemon tattoos online. Other things we added were glow-in-the-dark bracelets, 10pcs per pack, also from the Dollar Tree. Other things in the small goodie bags were a pokemon card, crunch bar, blow pop and 3 pcs of crayons.
I used a birthday ribbon ($1 at the dollar tree) and double-sided tape to keep the crayons together, to be used for the coloring pages. An idea we had for this was to also have a black and white picture pasted on the back of the bag to be colored. Fail on this one again. (*Sigh)
Successes and failures for this party were I guess unavoidable. I knew to not have the 5K and Zenon's birthday back-to-back but I believe both events were successful in their own right. Especially since in the end I was able to make one last, I believe, very awesome personal touch to my baby's birthday, his own Ash Ketchum costume!



Zenon is Ash Ketchum
Even without any budget constraints, I still wouldn't have bought a costume for Zenon because they were just so ridiculously priced and not really what I was looking for. So all the last bits of energy I had, I put into making Zenon's costume.
With all honesty it was easy enough to do now that I've done it, but because I do not have a sewing machine, neither do I know how to use one, and with my non-existent sewing skills, it took everything from me to muster up all my energy to come up with a way to make it plus enough energy to just finish it and finish it on time. There was however no going around the hat, that one, I definitely had to buy online.

This picture was taken at 7:30 am. Zenon woke up to directions to his surprise, the costume. The directions led up to my room where the small yet very important components of the surprise were, the pokedex, pokeball with pikachu, gloves, the hat and mirror were.

I'll post a tutorial on how I made the costume, too. This one will take a while because I do not have any pictures. I was too sick and too focused on finishing to remember to do that. Good times!





In the end, I honestly believe this was one of the best birthdays I have ever put together for my baby. It's the first time I went all out with it. Like my wedding (but failed marriage. *Oh, well.) I put my heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears into it, and like the wedding, I got sick from exhaustion, too.

I had to be somewhat dressed appropriately to be in harmony with Zenon's birthday theme. Black shirt, white shorts and red belt. Solved!

Will I do this again? Yes, I would. I'm more terrified of the day that my baby finally grows out of themed birthdays. Until then, every year will be like this, even better because instead of preparing a month before, we're doing it 2 months before at least. :)
Happy Birthday baby! I love you so much!

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