Throw the best birthday bash for your kids

Design everything from invites to activities with the help of your PC

By Laura Pratt

Last year, Wendy Putler decided on a Harry Potter party for her daughter, Lauren. After visiting the party store and overdosing on Harry Potter paraphernalia, Putler hit the computer. A few keystrokes later, she had finished planning her daughter’s ultimate party.

In this day and age, throwing a child’s birthday party is a walk in the park courtesy of the copious assistance available at your fingertips. For creating funky invites, personalized thank-you cards and loot bag rewards or crafts, the computer is invaluable.

Design your birthday party plan

Putler’s experience began with an Internet search of Harry Potter. Then the stay-at-home mom from Arizona widened her query with the words wizard and spells. An exploration of Birthday Express rewarded her with scores of game and activity ideas for Harry Potter birthday and wizard parties.

Along the way, Putler stumbled across a web site that listed all the spells in the Harry Potter books. She gained inspiration from the spells and created her own book in Word. These “spell books” would prove big hits among Lauren’s guests as a magic-making activity at the party. Putler also printed a large-size poster of the logo to affix to the wall behind where the guests would eat their cake.

Next, Putler polled her friends via e-mail for other ideas and came away with a potion recipe, a cauldron loot bag idea, some party games and instructions on easy-to-sew capes for the kids. To finish, she exported the addresses from the school’s directory she created on her computer and made a mail-merge file for addressing the invitation and thank-you envelopes. She stored all this data on her computer.

“The nice thing about this was that I could put all of my findings, including markers for the web pages I was using, into one folder, so it was all there for me whenever I had a chance to work on it,” Putler says.

Cook up cake decorations

Justine McVeigh is similarly enthusiastic about the role her computer has played in making her a star with her kids. She threw her son, Thomas, a Rescue Heroes party. The adventure began when McVeigh went online to the Fisher-Price web site to research her son’s favourite characters. She then went to Loblaws and asked for a cake with a Rescue Heroes theme.

The invitations for the party were printed on the computer. Finding herself on a roll, McVeigh also printed off Rescue Heroes nametags and thank-you notes. Every time she found a neat-sounding party game or fun food, she’d bookmark the site. And then last December, this stay-at-home mom from Toronto one-upped herself by hosting a superhero party for 14 boys.

Start with a checklist

You can use the computer’s many resources to throw your child a memorable party. Start by jotting down some ideas for favourite birthday party themes and decorations. Then get organized by making your own party planner in a word-processing document. Create columns for the various items — guest list, invitations, venue, food, games, activities, loot bags, music, thank you cards — and then check them off your list with a journey through cyberspace.

Create birthday activities with your computer

You can make birthday crafts with your computer. There’s a playroom’s worth of ideas online.

• Check out Microsoft Home Magazine’s temporary tattoos for a fun do-it-yourself party activity.
• Have kids make their own stickers by downloading images from the Internet or designing their own in a drawing or painting application. Print off the images on labels from your local office supply store.
• At DLTK’s Printable Crafts For Kids, you can find fun crafts and colouring pages and view craft projects by type or materials used. Or you can make your own crafts using Clip Art images in your own word-processing programs.
• Have party tunes playing in the background. Use Windows Media Player to download such childhood favourites as “Supercalifragilistic” and “Humpty Dumpty” from Momsview.
• Kids’ Party Fun is loaded with more than 1,000 party themes. Each one is complete with suggestions for invitations and activities. A dinosaur party, for example, might start with invitations written on a rock. Keep the kids busy with a dinosaur dig and a prehistoric obstacle course.
• FamilyFun’s Cake Finder has simple instructions to bake any kind of cake, such as pizza cakes and Green Eggs and Ham cakes.