Little Monsieur’s mad science party

As a full-time working mama, I often feel quite guilty for not spending enough time with my little ones (who doesn’t…) and organising their parties from scratch is one of the many ways I have found to tone that guilt feeling down somewhat. By “from scratch”, I mean I don’t outsource anything at all, with the exception of the cake: cake baking and most importantly decorating is really not one of my strengths, I simply refuse to embarrass myself. But besides the cake, I plan and execute everything, with the dutiful help of Hubby Dearest who I think has come to dread party planning time… but I love it.

Three reasons why I love to do everything myself: I enjoy creating and decorating, I don’t like anything event planners have to offer (it all looks a little cheap and unoriginal yet it costs a fortune) and of course, it means I’m spending weeks focusing on what will make the littles smile on the big day.

One of my favourite kids parties to organise was Little Monsieur’s Mad Science birthday, which we had in our Johannesburg home. I try to keep most of our parties at home, it allows to set up as early as I want to (this year we started setting up on Tuesday for a party on Saturday) and to go as big as I want…

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As usual, I first spent a little time online, mainly on Instagram and Pinterest, gathering inspiration, then I got to planning. Some props were easy to find, we were able to reuse the skull that we had brought from London and had already featured in a few parties (Pirates, Halloween…that skull has been used so often I should name it). We also re-used some party items that come handy each time and were well worth the investment: the drink dispensers, the cake stands etc; we use them over and over again no matter what the occasion.

Some other items were positively impossible to find. When we had this party I hadn’t discovered the Johannesburg-based party accessories hire places I know of now, so we had to buy the lab beakers and bottles from a real science shop, and I’m not quite sure when I’ll next have use for them, but we’ll see… That is also where we found some perfectly sized plastic petri dishes to have the pretend virus growth cultures (in reality blue and green jelly with silver sprinkles that we let dissolve on top).

The background blackboard-like panel with all the formulae was a download I ordered on Etsy, where I also found the printables such as the invites and the table labels: Johannesburg isn’t very big on original kids party shops but if you find anything online that you want to print, the print shops are really good and you can get some really fun things done.

I ordered the balloon garland and the tableware at Party Spot: the guys at their balloon counter are fantastic, if you explain to them what you need they will do pretty much anything with balloons, including a garland that makes it look like toxic bubbles seeping out of a lab bottle and on to the floor… I then customised the bamboo cutlery by adding some silver moshi tape and the glasses by adding a sticker where I drew graduations to make them look like lab beakers. Other fun finds: plastic syringes where we served green coloured custard cream, and test tubes filled with colour-matching M&M’s.

The entertainment was a fun yet educational session with Nutty Scientists: we had a real scientist (related to Einstein apparently…) come guide the children through a session filled with fun experiments such as making elephant tooth paste, creating mini explosions etc. The kids wore lab blouses and goggles we bought from our local building materials store. Everyone got to participate and it was a sparkling success.

Setting up was relatively easy for this one as all we had to do was fix the background to the sweets table and set up two extra tables: one for the experiences and one for the tea. I tried to keep in the spirit of a lab with high stools, and decorated some further with little lab mice (from a Halloween party a few years back), dry snow some slinkies. The tables and stools come from Hire Society, where I also like to hire for our grown-up parties…

And of course, we can’t have a birthday party without a cake. These days I order all my cakes from Carmella’s: I have tried a couple of other places before and found that this is the place to come for beautiful, delicious and reasonably priced celebration cakes. There you have it, our mad science party in a few pictures and words… I hope you like it!

With love, S.