How to Plan a Spy Theme Birthday Party for Kids

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.

A second choice for party invitations is to create a code and write the invitation in code. Make sure and provide a key or other clues so the recipients can decode the invitation in time to attend the party.