Party Planning--The Final Countdown

Now I know why my only childhood birthday party memory is a giant strawberry made out of newspaper where we played "pin the stem on the strawberry" for my Strawberry Shortcake birthday. Parties are a lot of work. After that I remember having my birthday parties at the local community college swimming pool where the only planning is making sure everyone brought their suit and towel and knows how to swim. Good thinking, Mom.

I'm not going to shell out big bucks to have a over-the-top theme party, so my kids will get a "Mom tries really hard" theme party. As I've mentioned, Emma picked Webkinz as her theme so we're running with it. I scoured the internet for party ideas and found quite a few. For those of you who are well versed in Webkinz, you will know what I'm talking about. If you don't, just pretend like you care.

We will have a sign greeting the kids that says "Today in Webkinz World" with activities listed. I haven't figured out what order to do the activities yet, but here is what I have:

• Gem Hunt--they will search for gems. I have some "rocks" made out of brown wrapping/packing paper. There are 6 with gems and the rest are slag. They can find one rock with gems in it. After everyone has found gems, we will make crowns of wonder. The crowns are glittery visors I cut to look like crowns (or fire, if you ask the birthday girl) and the gems are all sicky back gems or glittery foam stickers.
• Jellybean Challenge--guess the number of jellybeans in the jar.
• Quizzy's Corner--ask them some trivia questions
• Zingos Pop--unload a bunch of blown up ballons onto the floor. Assign each child a color, and see who can sit on and pop all their balloons first. Will work better once I buy balloons, which I remembered I forgot on my 5th trip to WalMart yesterday.
• Kinz Pinz Bowling--let them bowl with the plastic bowling set.
• Webkinz Mini Golf--let them golf with the mini golf set we have.
• Pizza Palace--make their own pizzas for supper.
• W Shop--they can buy and decorate their own pet carrier.
• Wheel of Wow--spin and win a fabulous prize. I wasn't going to have a Wheel of Wow until I felt guilty enough to make one. I mean this is one of the things you do everytime you go to Webkinz World. I have the wheel made and the prizes, just need to figure out how to rig it to spin. All my engineer of a husband could suggest was a brass fastener--duh, I thought of that but somehow I missed the brass fastener aisle at WalMart. Believe me, I looked.

Do you think that is enough to keep 6 six year olds busy for two hours? We have lucked out for Emma's last two parites and when everyone is bored and all my planned activites are done or were flops, we went outside and blew bubbles and ran around. The forecast for Friday from 5-7 is rain, so that may not be an option.

Today's activities include baking a cake, picking up the house, finishing up the games, grocery shopping, mailing packages for hubby, soccer practice, decorating a cake, making cookies, making a brownie pizza and wrapping presents. Think I can get it all done?!