A Totally Gnarly 11 Year Olds SK8 Party! | Life Love and Hiccups: A Totally Gnarly 11 Year Olds SK8 Party!
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Monday 11 June 2012

A Totally Gnarly 11 Year Olds SK8 Party!

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11 Year Old Boys Birthday Parties - man they are a tough one to navigate. It has to be the right combination of fun, edginess, coolness and within budget and parental approval of course.

My kids get a birthday party every second year, it just so happened that they were all due for one this year and I was pretty much running out of ideas. My son Kai knew right from the beginning what he wanted to do this year - he wanted a Skate Party.

Lucky for us we have an awesome indoor skate centre just 20 minutes away from where we live - Gromtown. For a fee you can hire out the centre and your child and a handful of mates can have skate lessons. We had 3 awesome young guys that were instructing our kids on the day and despite a few radical stacks and bruises the general consensus was Gnarly Dude! (yes I am purposely trying to sound like a hormonal tween, just in case you thought I had finally completely lost it!)

Now with three boys I have pretty much given up the idea of ever putting together a cute little girls party (at least until the grand kids come along in like a zillion years). That being said, boys parties can be just as much fun to plan. In this case I embraced the challenge of keeping it cool and edgy enough to please a preteen AND I managed to have a lot of fun creating all the bits and pieces that I love doing for kids parties.

I am forever pinning kids party ideas on Pinterest (for both boys and girls parties), so feel free to check out my Pinterest boards here for ideas I have found on the net.


Just as I was in the planning stage of this birthday party, I was very lucky to be approached by a gorgeous woman - Anne from Ur Invited. Anne offered to put together a range of printable designs I could use for the party, using whatever theme my son decided to choose. In this case it was the skater theme and Anne provided downloadable files for me to print off for everything from invitations to cake toppers, chocolate and drink wrappers and thank you notes. Everything was done to my son's specs and in his words "They were awesome Mum!"So a HUGE thanks Anne for helping me scoring some major brownie points with my boy.


The Birthday Boy ready to gear up.


 The graffiti art at Gromtown was a huge hit with the kids.

And yep they even allow the little ones to join in too.

They taught kids about the importance of safety gear and warming up, which from a parents perspective is fabulous, as so many injuries can be avoided with the use of the right equipment.



Kai's little brothers put on a good show and at one point threatened to upstage him with 
their 'sick moves'.

But I know you really want to see the party stuff right? 

Given this was an afternoon party I didn't need to provide a nutritious lunch - so I had a free run with the treats, just the way I like it.

We had chocolate and vanilla cupcakes and fruit platters. The water bottles you can see below had the printable labels hot glued on and the cake toppers were also printables that I cut out with a circular hole punch and then hot glued to paper straws.


The printable chocolate wrappers were wrapped around some Cadbury's furry friends chockies. These gave what would have been considered a too 'babyish' treat some serious street cred.... apparently!


We had the usual party tables suspects like popcorn, jelly shots and lollies, however we stuck the lollies on skewers this time and called them fruit sticks...What?? They were totally fruit flavoured lollies!

 
At 11 the kids are a little torn, as lolly bags can possibly be considered too young. Here's a hint -  if you re name them Thank you packs and add some cool little bits and bobs in them, they are suddenly wayyyy cool again.

Our Thank you packs had some skate stickers, a twin pack of finger skate boards I picked up super cheap on ebay and a couples of sugar hits for good measure. Apparently they were right "Up there" in the lolly bag ..... sorry, Thank you packs stakes.

 

The cake was the tough bit for me this time. He didn't want anything fancy and as I was making his a cake on the day that it was actually my birthday, he didn't want me to go to too much trouble - bless him!

In the end we settled on a plain vanilla cake with chocolate dusted over the top to represent dirt (what else?) and a tech deck doing a fully sick grind on top. Awesome dude!


As I mentioned all the printables were designed by Anne Angel from Ur Invited and since I love nothing more than helping out a family owned small business I was more than happy to give Anne's business a plug. 

Since launching and running her graphic design studio, Anne Angel Designs, in 2003, Anne has been responsible for thousands of professional artwork designs. When her family of three came along, Anne soon found herself in new territory - designing birth announcements, Baptism and children’s party invitations and she loves to produce designs that are different to anything else available.

They now have an ever expanding collection of printable themes. “Printables includes artwork for invitations, plus other party products including chocolate wrappers, drink bottle labels, cupcake toppers, place cards, and thank you cards. In fact, the list is endless,” explains Anne. Each set of printable artwork carries a theme. It can be a specific theme, including pirates or fairies. It could be a graphic or pattern that becomes the theme or the theme can be a specific event including birthdays or baptisms.  

Anne’s printable artwork files can be seen on her “UR Invited” Facebook page. Once printable artwork is selected, ordering is a matter of emailing the printable code with the party details and child’s name. The artwork is customised and the completed files emailed within 3-5 days. “All Mothers need to do is print, cut and party,” said Anne.

If you want more information you can contact Anne through the Ur Invited Facebook page or via her website  www.angeldesigns.com.au

So tell me any other great themes or ideas for preteens parties I should know about?
I am entering a whole new world here you know! 

*Please note - Ur Invited kindly supplied the graphics for my son's party printables at no charge and I was under no obligation to post about them - I just thought they were super cool and as I said I love helping out small businesses when I can.