Motorway Road 5th Birthday Party

JJ is Road and Motorway mad and requested that his party be motorway themed! After an initial bit of thought was actually a lot of fun to plan and with a bit of advance planning relatively stress free on the day.
I kept the food quite straightforward with hot dogs and chips (even more straight forward as it was Dan who cooked them!! (Thank-you Dan! x)). It made great on the road style food and was a winner with everyone.
The wow factor came in the form of the great car food trays I found from Partyman.co.uk. With a black table cloth and road markings and a few traffic cones it was instant motorway! As this was our first party where a lot of parents dropped off their children rather than staying it made it a lot easier to have each child's food contained in one tray.

For afters I made gingerbread cookies with smarties for traffic lights. (Initially I cooked with the sticks but later cemented on with royal icing as the sticks fell off.) Popular with kids and Nannahs!

I also bought mini doughnuts and after covering them with chocolate icing, stacked them on the boys' wooden Makit toy (sticks and connectors) - this made spare tyres!

The other sweet treat was the apple cars that have been making the rounds on Pinterest. Great fun to make (even with a passenger!)

I was really pleased with how the food table turned out - especially as it came together so easily!

It didn't last long!

The piece de resistance food wise was the awesome cake made by my very talented cousin Emma! She really embraced the motorway theme with lots of road signs and specifically M40 signs (Joplin's favourite motorway!). Joplin was really overwhelmed by it!

It was even traffic light coloured on the inside! And very delicious indeed!!

We bought a racing outfit for Joplin from EBay which was a big hit - it came with a free Lewis Hamilton mask which provided a lot of laughs - it was certainly a good luck charm with a win for Lewis at the F1 that day!

We had a play day in the park opposite organised by the council earlier in the week with tons of cardboard boxes and paint and general junk modelling. It was a fab opportunity to make a petrol pump! 

 The other big hit was the car / kid wash! Originally made a couple of weeks ago here it was great fun and luckily warm enough to use!

 For a quieter activity we made Balloon Powered Cars! More details and a template download on those here. They were lots of fun and a good road themed craft that kept 5 year old boys' attentions for a short time!

We also had a bean bag toss into tyres I managed to salvage after the car's MOT a couple of weeks ago! Luckily we have nice neighbours willing to retrieve the ones that sailed over the fence!

And always an easy game to theme is the corners game. We played it with the coloured corners being cars - Ferrari, Audi, BMW and Mercedes. Joplin wanted DTM cars but as we needed an extra team he chose Ferrari. They all enjoyed it - especially when they won a sweet as they got out! I used the spinner from twister to choose each time who was out (or a 'winner!). It was nice to see all the children's dance moves!

We also played the 'traffic lights game'. All the children run around on various commands:-

• Green - Run around the area
• Red - Stop
• Yellow - Run on the spot
• Roundabout - turn round once
• Motorway - sprint 
• Speed bump - jump and carry on.
• Traffic Jam - walk or slowly jog beeping horn 
• Reverse Parking - walk backwards
• Breakdown - lie down until rescued by AA man (me!)
• Rain - use arms to mimic windscreen wipers 
• low bridge - hunch low
• bumpy road - bumpy jog!

Just for fun - no winners or losers but lots of energy used!

I had made a traffic light pass the parcel but with all the rest of the fun there simply wasn't time. I had alternated layers newspaper and traffic light coloured tissue paper. No treats in between but the final layer was a load of sweets. Piñata style!

Overall - great fun and a good success. Joplin was really well behaved as were all of his friends and I had a fab time playing with them! It was nice that Nannah and Grandad could join in the fun too!

Gift bag wise I made my own from a road atlas. You can see how I made them them here. For motorway favour bag fillings I made a numberplate out of a Kit-kat, traffic lights from a Swizzels drumstick lolly ( black card taped over with sticker dots), a car kit, and I also put together a mosaic sticker kit based on a car theme.

Finally, the day was played out to a Road themed play list on the ipod!
Here are the songs we used:-