My soon-to-be-10 year old daughter is obsessed this year with all things spy. When we visited Milwaukee this summer, she spotted an ad for a spy theme restaurant. That restaurant, the Safe House (click on highlighted words to read about it), with its secret passages and hideaways, turned out to be a highlight of our trip. It is no surprise that the experience immediately set her mind to work on transforming our house into a spy den overrun with spies. Ten year old spies to be precise. The sleepover kind. It is now my job to produce that spy theme birthday party overnight.
Naturally, I looked for a short cut. My first thought was we have a lovely spy theme museum in Washington, D.C., the International Spy Museum. Why not have a spy theme birthday party there?
Why not? I’ll tell you why not. I looked it up online, and it costs $4,000. No, I am not off by a factor of ten. Let me write that for you longhand: four thousand dollars! No overnight included, that’s just your basic afternoon birthday party. $4000 for a child’s birthday party? No way! Sigh. Back to the drawing boards for me.
Next stop was my email account. Lamenting to my best friend, Associated Content Producer Christine Tetreault, seemed to be in order. And lucky thing I lamented so piteously because she absorbed enough of my pain to point me in the direction of some fun spy theme birthday party ideas.
I did a little more research, activated my imagination, and voilà: the makings of a spy theme birthday party are at hand.
Invitations
A spy theme birthday party requires handmade invitations. One approach to the invitations is to cut and paste letters from newspapers and magazines to disguise the source of the invite. Instead of naming the child or giving the party address, try giving obvious clues to the child’s identity (e.g., hair color, height, teacher’s name, pet’s name, favorite activity) and a map describing the route to the spy den.
Aliases are a must for little spies attending a spy theme birthday party, so have each spy choose one and create a name tag (so that the other spies remember to use the alias instead of the spy’s real name.) Let the spies use letter stickers or letters cut from print media to create name tags so their handwriting does not blow their cover. You might even run an ongoing game to support the use of the alias. Give each spy a bag containing payoff incentives (individually wrapped pieces of candy). Each time he or she mistakenly blows another spy’s cover by using that spy’s real name rather than the alias, he or she must give a payoff (one piece of candy) to the first spy to detect and announce the blown cover to buy that spy’s silence. Or, is it a payoff? The spy who eats the candy may find her or his memory erased…
Provide numerous pair of plastic eye glasses, with or without noses and eyebrows attached, dime store wigs, capes, shawls and cloaks, hats, walking sticks, high heels, hand cuffs, mini flashlights, binoculars, and whatever other useful spy paraphernalia you might have around the house or be able to purchase easily. These are the disguises the spies will wear at the party. Wait until all spies have arrived to have them choose disguises so that the items are fairly distributed among the spies. Letting each spy choose one item at a time may work best for younger spies.
Games and Activities
Spy photos: take an instant photo of each spy before she or he dons a disguise. Let that spy decorate the photo with pre-cut construction paper enhancements such as hats, cloaks, daggers, eye glasses, mustaches, beards, wigs and other tools of disguise. Or, simply take a photo of the spy in disguise as a take-home souvenir from the spy theme birthday party. Alternately, these photos can be used to make a Spy-D card.
Lie detector: The game Lie Detector by Mattel is an obvious choice of game for a spy theme birthday party.
Double agent detector: for a fun fingerprint game, give each spy a piece of paper and supply an ink pad so that each may take his or her fingerprints. Once their prints are taken, announce that one of them is suspected of being a double agent. To weed out the double agent, the interrogator (adult) is going to conduct an interrogation. Each spy in turn will come into a separate room to be interrogated under a goose neck lamp with whatever silly questions strike the interrogator’s fancy. A spray bottle set for a light mist makes a humorous torture device to be used in prying confessions out of the little spies. The interrogator will designate one spy the double agent without telling the others. Swear this spy to secrecy. Have this spy handle an object that the interrogator has pretested for its ability to attract a fingerprint. When any spy other than the double agent is in the room, this object, designated vital to national security, must be hidden out of sight. Once all spies have been interrogated, the interrogator will bring the object to the spy den and announce the discovery of a clue to identifying the double agent. The interrogator will dramatically sprinkle some talcum powder on the fingerprint on the national security object and lightly brush away the excess with a soft toothbrush. (The interrogator should practice this before the party.) Once the interrogator has dusted the object for a print, the spies will compare the print to each spy’s fingerprints and see if the spies can identify the double agent who attempted to steal the national secrets. During the guessing, the role of the double agent is to throw the other spies off her or his trail by implicating other spies as the double agent.
Escape training: teach spies to escape from dangerous situations with this adaptation of the airplane game: on a level surface, randomly place a dozen plastic cups. If this game is played outdoors and it’s windy, the addition of some sand or water may be necessary for stabilization. Create random lanes with police tape or crepe paper and hang some safe obstacles like a shower curtain liner or strings of small bells. Blindfold a spy and give her or him a tape player with earphones. The tape should include instructions as to how to walk the escape route without knocking over the cups (3 big steps forward, turn right at a 45 degree angle, walk 6 baby steps…) When the spy brushes up against the obstacles, he or she will have to guess whether he or she is expected to crash through the obstacles or work around them. The spy who knocks down the least number of cups to successfully master the escape route wins a prize.
The dossier game: Every spy needs a dossier. To create a dossier for each spy at the spy theme birthday party, create a simple alphabet or symbol code key. Each spy’s code key should be different. Write a simple message in each code, explaining the instructions for this game (below), and then scramble code keys and messages so each spy gets mismatched messages and code keys. Place these in manila folders, one for each spy. The first mission of each spy will be to exchange a code key with another spy; each spy will continue to exchange code keys until receiving the one that decodes his or her instructions.
Each manila folder will contain 14 envelopes; 2 of each will say “name,” “country,” “title or description,” “occupational title or animal,” “activity,” “geographic feature,” and “item.” Each spy will have a two sheets of paper containing the dossier of two different subjects in this format: (name), the (title or description) of (country), was captured by (occupational title or animal) while (activity) in/on a (geographic feature) without his/her favorite (item). Without opening the envelopes each spy will exchange one envelope of like kind (name for name, activity for activity, etc.) with another spy. Upon receiving the envelope, the spy will open it and glue the word inside to either one of his dossier sheets in the space indicated. The spy may glue any word to either sheet as long as that space is open but must immediately glue the word in place upon receiving it. After all spies have exchanged all envelopes and glued words in place, they will take turns reading their dossiers out loud. Of course, it is important to choose some incongruous and hilarious words to place in the envelopes and to make sure that they will fit together to form literate sentences. For example, “Mrs. X (their teacher), the camel trekker of Jamaica, was captured by mountain lions while skydiving on an iceberg without her favorite toilet paper.” To make the game fun, use names of people the spies know, perhaps including some of the spies themselves!
The instructions will inform the spies that they must exchange their envelopes, one at a time, for an envelope held by another spy containing the same label. The instructions will explain that upon completing the exchange, the spies are to each open their envelopes and glue their words to one of their dossier sheets.
Food and Drink
Food and drink at a spy theme birthday party should be mysterious, but not so gross the spies will assume it’s poison and refuse to ingest it. For fun, consider buying some litmus strips and small test tubes or eye droppers online (they are very inexpensive) and having each spy test some of her drink before consuming it. The pH scale that comes with the litmus strips can be altered to indicate readings of “poisonous” or “safe.”
A molten lava cake can be redesignated as an explosive surprise cake for the birthday spy. Recipes for molten lava cake are available online. A trick candle complements the surprise theme.
