Brody's 4th Birthday Robot Party

A robot birthday party—Brody’s one request since seeing robots in Tokyo last March. Nearly a year later, we pulled off the robot birthday party of his dreams to ring in turning FOUR!

 Birthdays are bittersweet as a mom. A sure reminder of how quickly time goes by. I look back on pictures from the past years with tears in my eyes realizing how the round little baby face has slowly transformed into a handsome young man.

 But birthdays are also such a wonderful reminder of how loved our sweet little one is, not only by us, but friends and family.  Having lived in Greenville for only 9 months now, we feel extra blessed to have a wonderful new community of friends and classmates to celebrate with.

 I shared the party plans for Brody’s Robot 4th Birthday a few weeks ago. We decided to have his party at a local gymnasium (Acrosmith  if you’re local). It was the perfect place for the kids to run wild.

 We celebrated Brody all weekend and jazzed up our home for the birthday boy, then brought the decorations with us to the gymnasium for the final birthday hurrah!

The Balloon Garland

I’ve always wanted to attempt a balloon garland and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Although time intensive, we had so much fun making it. Brody helped me with nearly every detail of it. From filling up the balloons to assembling the garland—it was a team effort!

If you are going to attempt a balloon garland, these 4 items were necessities: an electric balloon pump, a balloon tying tool, balloon tape, and a low temp glue gun. If we hadn’t had these items, we would probably still be putting the garland together two days later.

I made the base of the garland all grey then hot glued fun prints and smaller size balloons to the outside of the garland. It held up really well—even after jamming it into my husband’s tiny car to transport to the party.

The Robot Decorations

One of the easiest party DIYs was creating the robot posters. Using black foam board and a white chalk marker, I drew simple little outlines of robots. You could easily do this DIY for any party theme. I topped it off with a fun little holographic banner saying "The Brobot turns 4" — we couldn't resist the play on words!

I wanted to have a festive backdrop for his birthday cake. My friend Belena, who owns the amazing party shop Geese and Ganders , sent over a package of fun, black, white and silver paper fans. I collaged them onto the wall using painters tape to stick and wove a few different banners and garlands from her shop through the fans.

The Cake

My favorite party hack is ordering plain cakes and cupcakes from the grocery store and sprucing them up to fit the theme. Remember when I did this with Isla’s peach party? For Brody’s party, I ordered a plain grey smash cake and using fondant and marshmallows, transformed it into a robot head. It took less than 10 minutes to put together and it was so cute.

I saw a few robot cake stands floating around Pinterest. Using them for inspiration, I headed to the dollar store and bought supplies to create our own version. We used 2 pizza pans, 1 pie pan, and 2 round cardboard gift boxes to build the robot body. I hot glued it all together. Brody helped me string foil cupcake liners on pipe cleaners to create the arms.

I filled the robot body with cupcakes from the grocery store. I just had them ice the cupcakes in the same color as the smash cake (robot head) and add clear sprinkles to give them a little shine. I set the cupcakes in fun grey baking cups to pull the whole piece together.

The Paper Goods

One of my favorite parts of party planning (or any celebration really) is mixing and matching the paper goods. I talked a lot about this when I shared the party planning details, but I loved layering different sized plates and napkins, along with different cups of all sorts of prints. The key to this is sticking to a color scheme—we did black, white and iridescent silver. The gridded napkins, little mini disco plates layered on striped plates and striped cups were some of my favorite pieces.

The Food

With a party from 2-4pm, we hit an interesting time for food. I think one of my biggest hosting fears is always running out of food, which usually means I buy about 2x’s as much as we actually need. After some feedback on Instagram, we decided to order a party tray of little pepperoni and cheese wraps for a snack, along with cupcakes and juice boxes for the kids.

 I’m not sure if many kids ate the little wrap snacks —I think most went straight for the cupcakes. After they chomped those down, they went right back to playing. Proof that four-year-olds really do not care about the food (except Brody who was begging for food the whole party).

The Party Favors

I always have so much fun picking out party favors. We found paintable ceramic robot piggy banks and tied them up with paint and a paint brush. It was easy to put together and a fun non-candy treat. I’ll be keeping this one in mind for future birthday parties.

Celebrating our little Brobot this weekend was such a beautiful reminder of what a blessing it is to be a mom. From the pure joy and zest for life he brings to everyday to the love and patience and he has taught me, it is truly the biggest honor to be his mom.