a party for heroes.

Hi, I'm Jenelle and I'm a party-a-holic. We party big around here and planning get togethers is quite possibly my favorite thing to do, so when I realized that Eldon will be turning five while we are in the hospital for Max's surgery, I wanted to throw him a party that would make him feel extra special, because he is.

He is big into all things superheroes and I can't think of a more fitting theme for the hero in my life. The boy with the shield of adaptability, who can't be touched by worry or change. When the world is in turmoil and hurling new homes, new brothers, and new schools at him, he just stands sturdy with his cape...ready to charge right in and show us all how living is done.

Words can't express how proud I am of this boy of mine and how happy my heart is to see his giggling smiling face every day, knowing that to him...this is all just mighty fine. He is my best medicine.

So...what's a mom to do on a super tiny budget? Get super crafty. (and talk dad into paying for a bouncehouse.)

Here are a few of my favorite frugal decorations from the party.


{posterboard signs}
Easy peasy. I bought a bunch of posterboards from the dollar store and cut them up like this. I will guess that the total cost of these was $10.00 and I made a bunch of them and used the scraps for other crafts.

{the backdrop}
My family is pretty much full of asskickers so even the adults answered the call for superheroes and came dressed to impress. I love this bunch SO much. For this, it pays to have a stepdad in the siding business. I took a big piece of Tyvek and painted a city scene on it. I threw a couple of the homemade posterboard signs on it and viola! we have incredible photos like these.

{cut up comic book stuff}
I'm sure that this is sacrilegious to some people, but I totally chopped up some used comic books. I grabbed the most child-friendly comics I could find at Half Priced Books for 25 cents each. That's a grand total of $1.50, ladies and gentlemen. Then I mod podged them onto some dollar store vases, cut some out for a banner, and backed my favorite full pages with some posterboard.

{the phonebooth}
Hey, friendly local appliance store! Score! Free refrigerator box and leftover paint in my parents basement. BOOM. Free. It's a good thing we had this thing handy because Clark Kent WAS in attendance. The kids LOVED running in and out of this thing. Cardboard box wins every time.

{food table}
This was so cheap I can't even stand it. I used the vases mentioned above, a dollar store tablecloth for the "sky" and cut out a made-up Seattle-ish skyline out of a black posterboard.

{newspaper poster}
A friend posted this link to my wall on facebook the day before the party...but I had to have it. So, I threw it together suuuuper duper fast (using publisher, saved it as a PDF) and uploaded it to Staples online for printing. Want in on the best tip ever? For black and white projects like this, call it an engineering blueprint and Staples will print it for around $3.00. Yep, this super cool project was less than five bucks! Since I wrote it so quickly and didn't take a lot of time to get the design just right, I am going to make a more polished one to hang in Eldon's room.

Of course, there was the bouncehouse which is far from frugal but worth every penny if you can swing it. The kids decorated their own masks (which can be cut out from a pack of foam that you can get at the dollar store) and the grown ups had just as much fun, I think. I made Eldon some sweet new capes to wear, but he insisted on a batman t-shirt and mask from target and well....birthday boy rules.

Here a few more pictures, including a couple of the birthday boy who must have been busy saving the world, because I hardly saw him all day.

THANK YOU to all of the superheroes in our lives, who swooped in to make Eldon's party a success. This theme was so much fun we may be repeating it in the future.