How to Personalize a Birthday Party Outside of Home

After three somewhat over-the-top birthday parties, I decided to scale back for my son’s fourth birthday. For his first birthday we simply invited friends and family to our home. When he was turning two, we added his playgroup friends and by his third birthday the playgroup had doubled in size. By the time his fourth birthday was approaching, he was in school and we were adding school friends to the invitation list. I think you can see my struggle here with home vs venue party. Given the potential number of guests and my tendency to include elaborate handmade elements to the parties an using an event space was looking more attractive. It was time to search Pinterest for how to personalize a birthday party outside of home.

When I started planning I searched for a theme related to driving that’s appropriate for a four year old. My son had developed an interest in Hot Wheels and Mario Kart so I looked for food, activities, and decorations that went with those themes. The more I found the longer my to do list grew. If I decided to have the party at home I would be building cars out of cardboard, a race track course, hiring teenagers to help me coordinate, and making racy food for 20+ children! I quickly decided that making and designing a party for that large number of children would be too much. However I continued to look for inspiration to help me infuse our theme into the venue setting we chose.

I searched all over the internet for a local venue where 4 year olds could drive their own car and I found one! Once I found the venue with the junior go carts, I never looked back. Get ya roll on birthday party theme was born!

Everybody Get your roll on!

The main reason to host a birthday party at home is that you have complete control over the event plans including decorations, schedule, menu, space planning and number of guests. The advantages of having a party at an event space is most of those plans are predetermined which reduces the time you have to commit to planning and executing those details. Additionally, the lack of pre- and post- cleaning required is very attractive. Since, I decided to host the party outside of the home, I used the following strategies to personalize a birthday party outside of home and customize the experience as much as possible.

Use a theme-related activity to personalize a party outside of home.

Steps to personalize a venue party with your theme:

• choose a venue that is theme related or has an theme related activity
• choose decor with similar colors
• bring your own theme related decor
• have theme related cake
• ask the kids to wear themed clothes
• have theme related dress up favors to use during party (themed party hats)
• customize face painting or balloon animals with theme
• bring theme related food if permitted
• have the venue play your custom themes playlist if possible
• make your own theme focused favor bags

Hint: you don’t need to do all of these to successfully create the theme.

The “get your roll on” party was successfully themed and personalized.

We had the party at a venue with go-carts which was on target for our theme. This was the first time any of the kids (mostly 3-4 year olds) operated a go-cart by themselves. It proved to be a huge adventure and really precious to watch. And I was able to watch since I wasn’t busy having to coordinate everything like you do when hosting at home.

I chose the sports themed room which had a mural of an audience on the wall. I brought hot wheels table decorations. The venue decorated with the colors that I already requested so they all went together. I had a family member, who is a professional baker, make a pull apart cupcake cake in the shape of the number four with icing decorations that were car racing themed in the party colors. I searched for racing helmets but they were cost prohibitive so we used the hats provided by the venue. The goody bags included a build-your-own race car kit, hot wheels, snacks, and hot wheels and Cars play pack coloring kit. Best of all, after the party we went home and didn’t have to clean up!