Cars Birthday Party for a 4 year Old

Some people like my husband, would say I go overboard on birthday parties for my kids. I say I do just enough to make sure they know they are special, and that the day they were born was a wonderful day in my life. Growing up we had birthday parties, not as extravagant as I throw, but all of it was done by my Mother, Helen. She made the cakes always from scratch, with love, and spent many late nights decorating them. As much as some don't want to admit they are just like their mothers, I am just like mine, and that's a good thing.  I start decorating my cakes late at night and typically finish in the wee hours of the mornings. This birthday party was no exception, although I think I was done decorating this cake by midnight thanks to Wilton's sugar sheets. It was other prepping that kept me up much later.  I think I could easily take 3 months to plan a party as I like to do everything I possibly can by myself.  I have made every invitation for all birthday parties thus far, make as many decorations as I can myself, do my own cakes, and food.  Party planning is part of my new business at Carolina Swag Bags. The Disney Cars Birthday Party was going to be one of those WAY over the top parties because my son is enthralled with the movies. He has more die cast Cars cars than any others. As we were deciding which ones we would use for the party my husband and I decided it was really ridiculous how many he has, but we enjoy buying them for him, and they were great motivation for potty training and sleeping in his bed all night! We had the party at our church in a large room and it was the best idea we could have had! We wouldn't have had room to accommodate the "racetrack" we made out of black table plastic with 3 lanes for racing cars down with yellow stripes made out of yellow duct tape. Here is the picture of our track.

The kids had a blast using my sons' Cars pull-back cars and Shake-n-Go cars and racing them down the  track.  We had heats and winners.  It was a big hit! The church had the orange cones they use for parking so we just borrowed those to put around the track.

When the kids arrived we had a table set up with name tags that had Secret Agent on the top of them. This was the Secret Agent Verification, as I wasn't sure how many kids were coming and didn't know all the parents so it was a way to give out a number to a kid and a parent to make sure the kid went home with the right parent. Here are the invitations and the secret agent verification table

We decided to put all those cars that we have purchased to good use and make "movie scenes" out of them, so I wrapped up some flat empty boxes (and a board game) in black and red paper and put movie scene on the box and we recreated scenes from the movies to decorate our tables with. Here are the movie scenes. Definitely a cheap way to decorate your tables!

For all the food items we used movie themes as well. The food was at Flo's V8 Cafe, drinks were Red's Watering Can, and Fillmore's Organic Fuel, the cake table was Sarge's Surplus of Sweets. We had Luigi's Casa Della Tires with the leaning tower of tires (chocolate covered donuts,) we had Sheriff's Traffic light rice crispy treats which were simply chocolate covered on one side with red yellow and green m&m's for the lights, and we had chocolate dipsticks, that were just chocolate covered pretzel rods. I didn't think all of this up on my own but got some ideas from other Cars themed party blogs I had read. Here are those items.

At Flo's V8 Cafe we had Sally's Salsa, Doc's Guac, Mater's Tater's (potato Chips,) Frank's Fruit, and Flo's Franks.

Radiator Springs wouldn't be complete without Sally's Cozy Cone Motel, Radiator Springs Curios, and Ramone's House of Body Art. I got 6 small orange cones and placed them on one table for the motel and the "curios" were the gift favor bags for the kids. We had a small table set up with temporary tattoos for the kids at Ramone's.

Each kid designed their own race car magnet which was a piece of wood in the shape of a race car (29 cents each at Michaels) that I glued a magnet onto the back of with Gorilla Glue (that stuff is awesome if you haven't used it before.) After the acrylic (fast drying) paint dried we put a clear coat varnish on them. (Thanks Brittney!)

I started looking for inspiration for this cake on the internet. There were definitely some fun Cars cakes out there.  I knew that black, white and red would be the main colors, with a splash of yellow for punch. After making cute cake pops for my son's actual birthday at school I got inspired to do this cake; here are the cake pops and the finish line cake!

 The Dollar Tree was great for items for the favor bags with Cars 2 having just been released recently there were plenty of items to choose from for the bags. On Etsy I found cute stickers that were personalized to put on the bottoms of Hershey Kisses, that had a picture of a Cars 2 character and Happy 4th Birthday Kerrick on them, these were very inexpensive on Etsy I think $5.50 including shipping for 96 of them. I also got cellophane favor bags and alternated red yellow and brown M&M's in them with a favor tag tied with ribbon that said "Thanks for coming to my party" with my son's name in the middle of them, these were also on Etsy. I put a sticker on the back of one of the M&M's favor tags and whoever got that favor won a special prize.

My husband would say that the kids would have been happy with just racing all the cars and crashing them around for the 2 hours that the party was, and he is probably right. Many would say I go overboard, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, but can I just say that planning a party like this and being able to use my creative bones God gave me, makes me a very happy person. Besides the smile on my kids faces when they see all I have come up with for them makes every late night of planning and cake decorating worth it!