A Pirate Birthday

Diana’s note: This is a repost. Since GoDaddy discontinued my old blog, I am reposting a few blog posts I want readers to be able to access. Thank you.

I’m not much of a party person. Which is too bad, since I have six children. But my talents lie elsewhere, not in thinking of fun kid parties. Given my…shortcomings, each of my kids ended up with only one really creative birthday party, and even then, I recycled an idea for two of my boys. It was a pirate party, and the boys were 20 years apart. (I essentially have two families, my kids range in ages from 10 -32; yes, this makes me an Old Mom for my youngest two, poor things.)

I first got the idea for a pirate party in The Tightwad Gazette . I know, I know, these days pirate parties abound, but back in the day it was pretty original (as well as thrifty). Heck, to give you a hint of how old I am I followed The Tightwad Gazette back when it was just a newsletter. The author, Amy Dacyzyn (pronounced Decision), wrote an article about a pirate birthday party with some great suggestions. No, I’m not above stealing ideas for birthday parties, why would you ask such a silly thing? The son, his brothers and friends had a great time.

Fast forward twenty years to the next pirate birthday party and this time there’s something called the I.N.T.E.R.N.E.T. (30 years ago back when I had more energy, life as a mom would have been so much easier with the Internet!) I found all sorts of cute pirate birthday ideas including cool cake ideas on Family Fun.

At Party City, I found a cardboard pirate chest and we filled it with individual sacks with goodies, many of them printable goodies off the Family Fun site. I even found some gold chocolate candy coins at a dollar store. We made picture maps, the first map led to the first location where another map waited with instructions to another location with the next map, etc. until the last map led to the treasure chest. Because we couldn’t decide which we liked best, we made two pirate birthday cakes, a treasure chest and pirate ship—both recipes are posted on Family Fun.

(Please, note, photography is not my thing, either. I actually failed photography in journalism. But if you look close you can tell one cake is a ship and one is a treasure chest, and both were actually fun to make.)

Pirate Parties are great fun, and are always a hit. Happy Birthday!

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