Diary of a Wimpy Kid Birthday Party

My husband and I have always loved to read, and I'm so glad that my son followed that love of reading.  His favorite books to read are the books of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney.  He's read all six books, multiple times, so it was no surprise when his 8th birthday rolled around that he wanted to celebrate Wimpy Kid style!

I found some fantastic inspiration on Pinterest and used some party details from different events to create a fun time for my son and his friends.

First, I started with the invitation.  And when I saw THIS cheese invitation from Cap Creations, I knew this was the one we would have to recreate!  I printed our party details onto yellow cardstock, cut them out into 5 inch squares and used my 1 inch hole punch and regular hole punch to add the holes to the cheese slice.  I then went back and used brown, orange and green ink pads to add the gross coloring to the cheese (using a q-tip).  We also included an extra slip of paper telling the guest, "You've got the cheese touch!"

We did a simple color scheme - black and white, like the drawings in the books, with a pop of red, like the color of the first book.  We had black, white and red balloons and I made a felt banner in the same colors with his name.

We even added our own stinky cheese to the front porch.  I took a slice of swiss cheese and colored it with markers.  Unlike the characters in the book, our guests had no problem picking up the cheese to gross everyone out!

My son decided to have a movie party, but we added in a few games to play in the beginning while we waited for all the guests to arrive.  We played Fregley's Sayings.  For this game, each guest received a slip of paper with something that Fregley says.  They had to read it, but their lips had to cover their teeth when they said it.  If you laughed you got eliminated, and the last person standing was the winner.  "Can you chew gum with your belly button?"

We also played the Secret Word game.  For this game, the player needs to get the group to say the secret word on their card, but without saying any of the forbidden words.  For example, one of the secret words was "diary" but the player was not allowed to say book, journal, red, wimpy or kid.

Did you know there were a few event kits released at the time of some of the books' releases that you can download for free?  That's where we found these two games.  You can download the Dog Days Event Kit, The Ugly Truth Event Kit, and the Cabin Fever Event Kit.

The last game we played was Mixed Up Wimpy Kids, and my son actually came up with this game idea.  Each player receives a recording sheet and a pencil.  Everyone takes a turn rolling the die.  Each number on the die represents a part of the character they are going to draw.  For example, if they roll a 1, they draw the head.  But since this is the Mixed Up Wimpy Kid game, they roll the die again to find out which character's body part they draw.  We assigned each number on the die a body part and a character from the books.  So, the kids ended up with some crazy mixed up characters with Fregley's head and Rowley's body, wearing Loded Diper t-shirts and sporting mohawks!  Even the names got mixed up!

While watching the movie the kids had pizza.  Then about halfway through, we held an intermission where the kids could fill up treat sacks with popcorn, pretzels, and candy.

After the movie we had cake and ice cream.  Here is the cake I made.  It's a vanilla cake, with cream cheese frosting and covered in fondant.  The lettering, cheese and squares on the top cake are all made of fondant.  The character faces were piped on using royal icing.  The figures holding the letters of his name are actual action figures.

For party favors I made diaries (I mean journals) for each guest.  I bought the little notebooks at the Dollar Tree and covered them with THESE free printables from the Kenner Road blog - they worked out perfectly!

I also created these Diary of a Wimpy Kid pillowcases for each guest.  I bought standard size white pillowcases from Walmart.  I used the freezer paper stencil technique to put "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" along the edge and used the crayon on sandpaper technique to put Greg and Rowley's images in the center of the pillowcase.  These were also a big hit!

The last thing we did was write thank you notes to our guests.  We typed a template for our thank you notes using Greg's thank you notes from the first book.  They were pretty funny and a great end to the Wimpy Party!

If anyone is interested, I can share the files from the Mixed Up Wimpy Kid game.  Files include the directions and recording sheets.  All of the images I just traced onto cardstock from online resources.  Just send me an email at themuddyprincess@gmail.com .