Ninjago Goodie Bags and Decorations

This has got to be the easiest way to decorate a party ever! You will need some printable sticker paper (Daiso has it ¥105 for 5 sheets), scissors and some software to re-size images. Go to our friend Google and google ninjago images, there are loads, find one with just a set of eyes, like this.

Drag it onto your desktop and open which ever software you are planning to use, I use photoshop but you can do it in Word or something similar too. All you need to do now is resize the eye so you have 6 on one page, they should be a good size for balloons. I actually digitally removed the eyes to save ink but you don't need to do that. Then just print out your eyes, cut them out and stick them to your balloons.

Resize them again to stick them to anything else you fancy, drink bottles or favours...

Notebooks...

Erasers...

Pencils...

 Candy...

Lolly Pops...

And then pop them all in a bag and slap some eyes on the bag too!

See, told you it was easy! If you missed the other party posts, click here for the ninjago food and here for the ninjago games.

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Ninjago Birthday Party - food

Yesterday was games, today food!
My philosophy with kids party is to make it easy, stress free and not worry about comparing myself to the 'perfect' parties that I see on Pinterest. I also can't see the point in spending a shed load of money on a kids party, cheap and cheerful is the way to go!

Green ninja pop. Store bought melon soda, a piece of green card wrapped around and slap on some ninja eyes (I will explain the easy way to make these in the next post). I put the kids names on the back of the label so everyone knew whose was whose.

Dragon Eggs - hard boil your eggs as usual, let them cool. Take them out of the pan and replace the water, mixing in the colour that you want your eggs, you can use food colour or a natural alternative as long as it doesn't have a strong flavour - you will end up with funky tasting eggs otherwise. Roll the eggs so that the shells are all cracked. pop them into the pan of coloured water and leave over  night. The next day all you need to do is peel them (these work well at Halloween too)

 Deep Fried Venomari. One of our guests bought this delicious chicken, we renamed it as snake, they say snake tastes like chicken...

Ninja Blocks. Another friend made these cool sandwiches, she used a lid from a bottle to cut out the little circles and a bit of butter as glue. Fillings were egg mayo or jam.

Ninja onigiri of course! When I was looking for inspiration for food for the party I saw a lot of sushi style dishes, but we live in Japan, sushi is not anything special, ninja rice balls on the other hand...

This still makes me laugh, just shows how silly my sense of humour is. This characters name is Cole...

Constricti Fangs. Fun names completely change the food you are presenting....

And finally the cake....

We have had a ninja cake before, so I went with the Lego theme instead. I used a small loaf tin and baked 3 cakes, one red, one yellow and one blue. Trimmed the top to make them square. Then I used marshmallow fondant for the icing (recipe here), I have learnt that summer in Japan and butter icing is not a good mix. The nobbles on top of the blocks are little cookies covered in fondant. This was a super easy cake to make, unlike The Castle! 

I forgot about the utensils stands we made, we used the big Lego, you can see them behind Ebi-kun, we made one for chopsticks, one for forks and spoons and one surrounding the handy wipes!

Lego is such an easy party idea - maybe we will do it again next year!

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Ninjago Birthday Party - The games

I decided to split the party posts up as not to over whelm, so we will kick off with the entertainment...

We started off with Kai's katana (sword) training. For this we used a wii game, from wii sport resort, where you have to chop various items in half. We did this as training and not competitive games because we had a mixed age and ability group of kids, so I was aiming just for fun. Oh yes, and the fella in the white is Sensei Wu - he is the Ninjago master.

Next was Zanes's target practice. Ebi-kun had made everyone 3 shuriken (ninja throwing stars) and I made a skeleton target, with his mouth open, you had to get the shuriken in his mouth, throw one run through and join the end of the line for your next turn, it was a fast moving game!

I used my teacher training and made sure we had a BIG game followed by a small game - big is for big movement, loud, get the wriggles out kind of game then to bring the level back down you slip in a quiet game. This keeps the day at a good energy level without kids getting over excited. I forgot to take a photo of Cole's Rock training, it was basically guess how many pieces of Lego are in the jar.

Then we had another BIG game, Jay's Spinjitsu Training, for this the training ninja sat in the spinning chair, Sensei Wu span the chair round 10 times and then the ninja had to walk down the line without falling off - rather amusing!

The next training was a stroke of genius on my behalf, Sensei Wu's Zen Training. We got the kids to sit cross legged and meditate for 5 minutes to calm them down before lunch! I can't imagine many kids go to a party and have to do meditation, worked a treat though.

After lunch we had a few rounds of bingo then the kids had free play and the parents had a good old gossip! For the bingo, I took photos of 30 Ninjago pieces, then set up a grid in Pages. dropped each piece into the grid at random, repeated with the next page. I was going to share the file but I am not sure of the legalities. 

We usually have a big party in the park but the weather has been all over the place this year so we decided on a small one at home instead, just as well since we had a massive thunderstorm in the afternoon.

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