Comments (1)

By Mom Unplugged, May 7, 2010 5:51 pm

Birthday parties don’t have to involve a depressing influx of cheap, unwanted (at least by parents!), commercial toys. If you can convince your children that family gifts suffice, you might be able to turn that excess of birthday party gift generosity into birthday giving generosity.

I really believe that children are charitable by nature. They just need to be taught about the needs of others and encouraged to engage in charitable work and giving. My hope is that this will help create more sensitive and socially conscious adults.

My 9 year-old daughter has enjoyed charity birthday parties for many years now. I already wrote about her first Humane Society birthday party (she has had several of these and one of her friends is doing it now too). After a few more years of charity parties, I now have more ideas to share with you.

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Today’s idea is the Kids-in-Need Stuffed Animal Party.

One year my daughter had a birthday party where she asked the guests to each bring one, new (tags on) stuffed animal to take to our local hospital Emergency Room. They give them out to very sick or injured children who come in and need a little extra comfort.

I am such a proud mama when I say that she came up with this idea entirely on her own. My sister is a physician in our local Emergency Room and having visited her aunt there, my daughter knew that they handed out stuffed animals.

In keeping with the stuffed animal theme, our party craft was stuffing our own animals with easy and inexpensive kits that I bought on Amazon. The kids LOVED this! My intention was that they add their animals to the donate basket, but this proved to be very unpopular and every single child elected to keep their animal (including my children). That’s OK, at least they had fun and went home with a much-loved party favor.

TIPS:

• Make sure you check with your local Emergency Room first to see if they would even want stuffed animals, and if so, what kind. Ours wanted tags on and no buttons or other things that could be pulled off to become choking hazards.
• Police and Sheriffs also sometimes carry stuffed animals in their cars to comfort any children they meet in accidents or other bad situations. See if your local law enforcement departments might be interested, and what they would want.
• Based on experience, I recommend that the donated animals “disappear” after the party or younger family members might start falling in love with them!

(More ideas to come!)

Comments (20)

By Mom Unplugged, October 19, 2008 9:04 pm

Mmmmm… cupcakes. Looks good, doesn’t it? This photo is quite deceptive. We have not been baking. Don’t try eating this yummy birthday cupcake because it is made out of old crayons!

This week’s Unplugged Project theme was wax. When I picked the theme I thought we might do something to recycle our crayons, but I didn’t know what. However this morning as I was lying in bed, I dreamed up these Birthday Cupcake Candles. The kids were enthusiastic, so I decided to risk complete disaster and give it a go.

I am almost too embarrassed to post this one, because it is a little over the top! But we certainly had a blast making these, and the suspense as to whether they would be a success or a giant flop, simply added to the fun.

They were a resounding success and really not hard to make at all, so here goes a tutorial:

You’ll need broken crayons, a muffin tin, muffin papers (foil ones are best), and birthday candles. If you have glitter and/or sprinkles, little candies, etc. that will add to the fun and enhance the realism. I think those little silver balls would have looked fantastic, but unfortunately we didn’t have any.

The first task was sorting the crayons. We dumped them all out and began looking for broken ones. My two year-old enjoyed this tremendously and she was the official color sorter.

Getting the papers off some of them was a difficult task. Why is it that kids can peel off crayon papers all over the house, but when you want the papers off, they stick! We discovered that soaking the stubborn ones in a bowl of water helped, as did peeling them with a knife (my job).

We finally had all our bits unwrapped and sorted into separate colors. Pretty aren’t they!

My daughter put the liners in the muffin tins:

Then we filled the cups with the crayons, one color per cup, taking care to not overfill.

My daughter eagerly loaded them into a 350 degree oven (actually we started at 200, but that was slow so I upped it to 350 and that seemed perfect):

Then came the nervous waiting:

When they seemed about halfway done (15 minutes or so?), we could see where the level of the melted wax was going to be:

We took them out and added a few more crayons to each so as to hopefully bring the wax up to near the top of the cups.

Finally, after about 10 more minutes, they were done. Great excitement ensued!

We had to be patient and let them cool for about 10 or 15 minutes before decorating.

First my daughter found some glitter and decided to put that on:

Then we discovered that if we put a toothpick in one color and swirled it around in another color, we could make pretty patterns:

Finally, after they had cooled a bit more (still squishy but solidifying), my daughter pushed a birthday candle into each one. If you wait until they are cool enough, the candle will stand straight. If they are still too hot, the candle will tip over. If this happens, take it out and wait until they are cooler.

They were also cool enough to decorate with real baking decorations! Totally fun!

After an hour or so, they were completely cool and we could remove them from the pan without squishing the bottoms.

And voilà! We were all so impressed. My 2 year-old wanted to eat one and we had to explain that she would have to eat a pumpkin muffin instead. She was pretty insistent, and even wanted one after dinner. Oh dear!

I’ll post a follow-up tomorrow as to how they held up as candles. Even if they don’t burn for very long, at least they can always be used as…well…crayons.

(By the way: The liners (even the paper ones) kept the wax contained so there was no mess in the muffin tin afterwards. In fact I was able to use it for pumpkin muffins when we were through.)

EDITED TO ADD: In response to questions/concerns about smell, these really didn’t smell bad at all while melting. I did notice a difference in consistency between cheap crayons and the Crayolas as we were peeling them, so my guess is that they are made differently, or of different ingredients. Most of ours were Crayolas. Perhaps the cheap ones are the stinky ones? By the way, the crayon wax did not burn well as a candle, so no danger of odors there!

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Did you do a wax Unplugged Project this week? If so, then please put a link to your wax post in Mr. Linky. If not, then please don’t link, but browse the great posts that are linked below. Also, read more about the Unplugged Project and how to join in here. Perhaps we’ll see you next week?

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Thin

I have no clue what we will do for it, but the word just popped into my head.

Enjoy!

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Comments (13)

By Mom Unplugged, June 11, 2008 12:11 pm

Are you tired of birthday parties at the pool, Chuck E. Cheese’s, or the local bowling alley? But perhaps the thought of entertaining a large group of over-excited kids at your house fills you with dread? The solution: Think outside the birthday box.

My good friend Wishy‘s daughter recently had an original and totally fun party at a local knitting store! Her daughter had become fascinated with the idea of learning to knit after watching her aunt knit, and announced that for her 8th birthday she wanted to have a “Knitting Party.”

Wishy was understandably perplexed, but gets a Mom of the Year Award for researching the possibilities instead of just saying with a sinking heart: ” But wouldn’t you rather just go to the pool like last year?” (Like I probably would have done).

She called up our one, tiny local knitting store and asked them if they ever did birthday parties. Well, no they had never done a birthday party, but they said that they thought it sounded fun and would be willing to give it a try.

Ten 7 and 8 year-old girls (including my oldest daughter) went to the party and learned how to knit a book mark. The shop gave each girl needles and yarn and they had three instructors on hand to help the girls. All Wishy had to do was bring the cake, plates, napkins, and drinks.

The girls had a ball and each went home with a completed book mark plus a goody bag put together by the shop containing more needles, two more balls of yarn, the directions for the book mark, and instructions for a pot holder to try at home.

The girls had fun, even the shop-owner claims to have enjoyed it (and hopefully has gained a few future customers), and now ten little girls (and Wishy) know how to knit.

That beats Chuck E. Cheese’s any day!

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Other unusual birthday party ideas:

• A visit to a fire station
• Visit a zoo, petting zoo, or alpaca farm
• See if you can tour a movie theater (many will allow school groups to tour, why not a birthday group?)
• Horse birthday: See if a local riding school or club might allow your group to come and give each child a short, guided ride on a horse around the arena
• Airport birthday: Visit your local small airport (I’m not talking O’Hare or JFK here). Picnic on the grass and watch the planes take off and land. Better yet, if you know someone who owns a plane, see if your friend would allow the kids to take turns sitting in the pilot’s seat. If your pilot friend has a handheld aviation radio, borrow it and tune it to the local airport frequency (the airport employees or your friend can help you with this) then the kids will be able to hear the pilots talk.
• Go Geocaching: Pick an easy one and give each child a small object to leave in the cache in exchange for taking one out. (You should probably try finding it on your own first to make sure it is easy enough and to avoid disappointments if it can’t be found).
• Go Letterboxing: Perhaps the kids could each create their own stamp before heading out to find the box. Be sure to pick an easy one. (Again, better do a trial run on your own first).
• See if your local pizza parlor would let you bring some kids in for a tour and to make their own pizzas. My daughter’s Brownie Troop did this and the girls loved it.

I’ll post more ideas as I think of them. Do you have any easy but unusual party ideas?

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For a charity party idea, please read about my daughter’s Humane Society birthday party.

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Cool knitting cake designed, baked and decorated by Wishy’s talented husband! Photo courtesy of Wishy.

Comments (9)

By Mom Unplugged, September 10, 2007 10:28 am

For me, it is one of those dreaded times of year again: birthday party time. A Good Mom probably cherishes these milestone moments and decorates for hours, bakes a cake from scratch, plans fun games and then sits back and enjoys watching her wee one having the time of his or her little life with perfectly well-behaved and polite little friends at The Birthday Party.

I, however, have come to rather dread The Birthday Party. For me it symbolizes a time of excess, greed and waste. Just call me Birthday Scrooge. I have grown tired of watching my kids rip wrapping paper off yet another toy we don’t need, only to toss it aside to rip the paper off the next one, as all the other kids “ooh” and “aah” with envy.This year I decided to suggest something different to my daughter. Having recently spent a lot of time at the local Humane Society shelter adopting a dog and three cats to add to our already large menagerie, I suggested that this year we have a Humane Society birthday where we would ask guests to bring an item for the shelter animals instead of the usual gift. My daughter loves animals and understands that many animals are homeless, but I wasn’t sure that a 7 year-old could be altruistic enough to forgo the excitement of birthday presents.

I picked my moment carefully (after we had finished sorting out a bunch of old, unplayed-with toys to donate) and made the suggestion:

“Every year at your birthday party you always get a lot of toys like these that you never play with and that just clutter up the house. How about this year we ask everyone to bring pet food, or something for all those homeless animals at the shelter instead?”

“Oh yes, yes, yes!!!” she said. Even her little brother asked if he could do that for his birthday too (we’ll see if he still wants to when his time comes next June).

We asked our cat sitter, who works at the Humane Society, to tell us what they really needed most right now. We put this list on an insert inside the party invitations. My daughter was very excited to help make the insert requesting donations instead of gifts. We even added some photos of our recent shelter adoptees.

We had the party on Saturday, and as you can see from the photo, the eight guests were extremely generous in their donations of food and toys for the animals! The parents all commented on what a great idea our party was. I am sure they were happier spending their money on food for the homeless animals than on a cheap toy for the child who has too much.

Today after school is the really exciting moment. I will pick my children up from school and we will take everything down to the shelter to give to them. My daughter can’t wait!

I must say that as I write this, I feel every bit the Proud Mama. My daughter, at only age 7, was able to derive pleasure from giving rather than receiving. For once, this was a truly enjoyable birthday party for us all!