Monster Truck Birthday Party on a Budget

 

December is a hectic time to host a birthday party, especially with a new baby in the house. Last year, we rented a local rec center gym, bought a Costco cake, and let the kids run free for an hour on tricycles, slides, and a bouncy house. This year, our budget is a bit slimmer and 6 is a bit old for trikes and toddler slides. Ezra requested a monster truck birthday party theme and I scoured the internet for affordable inspiration and ideas.

Monster Truck Themed Food

If you want to feed your guests, there are a multitude of clever ideas for a monster truck birthday party. A Half-Hundred Acre Wood provides a number of fun ideas, including a refueling station with drinks, as well as buckets of snacks with names like Spare Tires, Boulders, and Sky Wheelies. I admired all of this creativity, but I felt like cake, ice cream, and a drink were enough food for a group of 6 year-olds at an hour and a half long party.

We opted to have Chocolate Milk at our Refueling Station, using the free printable labels for A Half-Hundred Acre Wood for gas and oil.

Monster Truck Birthday Cake

I promised my husband I would no longer attempt crazy, impossible birthday cakes that cause huge messes and even more stress. One day, I will take a cake decorating class. Until then, we’ll work with simpler solutions like this one I created from borrowing different ideas from cakes posted on Google Images. I normally make my cake and frosting from scratch, but we went with boxed this year. Honestly, kids rarely eat much cake anyway (even when it is delicious buttermilk cake), so I was
more concerned with looks over taste.

Ingredients

Two 9 inch round cakes

Two containers of frosting (My son wanted vanilla, but chocolate would work really well as dirt  here)

Rice Krispie treats with 1/4 cup of cocoa mix added

Crushed Oreos

16 chocolate mini donuts

1 monster truck toy

2 miniature cars

Directions

Stack and dirty ice the cake rounds. Put in fridge to let frosting harden slightly.

Put Rice Krispie treats rectangular tupperwear containers and let set.

Frost cake.

Trim Rice Krispie treats to an angle to create a ramp.

Place ramp on cake top in the middle. leaving room for cars. Set monster truck on top at an angle. Place cars at the bottom of the ramp.

Sprinkle crushed Oreos next to the ramp for dirt.

Place donut “tires” evenly around the cake.

Monster Truck Birthday Party Games

If your child has a warm weather birthday, there are several blogs with terrific outdoor arena, monster truck pinata, and obstacle courses. We have a small home, so opted for game stations instead. I will say that, while the girls at the party didn’t mind lining up and were into party crafts and games, the boys in attendance would have preferred more unstructured play. If I had this to do over again, I’d probably modify it for more free play to include:

Build up blocks and knock them down with trucks.

Monster Truck Races

Monster Truck indoor Relay Games

For our party, we did the following (all printables from Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood):

Monster Truck Bowling

This is pretty straightforward activity. Crayon Freckles painted toilet paper rolls for their pins. We have a kid’s bowling set, so we simply used those and a large Grave Digger. Kids eagerly lined up for this one.

Pin the License Plate on the Monster Truck 

If you have the time and money to print a huge truck, go for it! You could even use the monster truck license plates the kids create. We decided to simply print out the 8 x 10 monster truck and tape it on cardboard. This variation of pin the tail on the donkey was fairly popular.

Make Your Own License Plate

I picked up some foam rectangles and stickers (including letters) from the dollar store and set this up as a kind of warm up activity while we waited for friends to arrive. This was not very popular with our male guests, but some came to the table later when the excitement wore down a bit.

Tinfoil Car Crush

This clever idea has kids build tin foil cars that can be crushed by monster trucks. We lined up a variety of monster trucks on a race track rug and had them make cars out of pre-cut squares of tin foil. This activity was fun, but short lived. I might recommend having some made ahead of time, so they can smash a line of cars along with the one or two each child makes.

Smash a Prize

I wanted a creative way to have the kids claim their goodie bags of bubbles, light up bracelets and necklaces, mini cars, and dum dums. I found this monster letter smash and decided to adapt it for our party. For my simple game, I wrote numbers on each bag up to the number of party guests, blew them up with air, then slipped the prizes inside. I placed the different bags on a car play mat. Each children rolled a die. If they liked the number (and it was available), they grabbed that bag. Otherwise, they could roll the second die for a larger number.

The prize were different based on colors and flavors. If I had to do it again, I would have a larger variety of prizes, so each bag felt different.

Monster Truck Decorations

We primarily let our games and toys act as decorations.My kids enjoyed finding toy trucks and cars from downstairs to use for games and decorate. They even found a robotic dinosaur to mimic the fire breathing ones found at some Monster Jam shows. I purchased traditional birthday balloons, plates, cups, and napkins at the local dollar store. You can definitely purchase Monster Jam themed items, but I’ve found that my kids care more about the cake and activities over pricey themed decorations. If I’d done better planning, I might have printed out some photos of Monster Trucks.