Yesterday we celebrated my daughter’s birthday. She turned 9 1/2.
Family photo – photobombed by my nephew
No, it’s not a regular thing that we celebrate on the half birthday but back in April when she turned 9, we were on vacation in Orlando. She got to stay in a nice hotel, go to the Disney parks, eat out every day and see old friends. For her actual birthday we went to the Animal Kingdom Lodge to see animals (she loves that), went to the pool and water park and met up with friends at a Hibachi restaurant and then went back to their house for birthday cake and treats. All sounds great, right?!?
Well for the past 6 months I’ve been hearing on a weekly basis how we never celebrated her birthday this year.
Wha?!?
By her definition of celebrating she’s referring to our traditional family dinner that we have at home. Her favorite food, her grandma, aunt and cousins all in attendance followed by birthday cake with our closest friends from the building.
I guess we did something right if that means more to her than a Disney vacation!
So, I decided to give her a surprise 9 1/2 birthday family dinner celebration last night. She was in her glory! It was everything she had been longing for for the past 6 months. It was really fun and I’ll share the dessert I made in a separate post but for today I want to share what we did for her last birthday party – A Monstar themed party. I’ve been wanting to show you this for some time now and seeing that Halloween is right around the corner it seemed like perfect timing.
It wasn’t a typo when I said MonstAr. In her class that year they had a monSTAR theme – cute monster things all around the class but reminding them that they are all a star.
When we were thinking about a theme for her party, we looked on evite for the invitations and there popped up a MonstAr themed evite! It was meant to be!
We started with the decorations by making big tissue puffs and making eyes from paper. We stayed with yellow , blue and green as the color scheme and hung them all around our living room.
Next was this Party Like A Monstar board. It served 3 purposes – decoration, a bean bag toss game and a photo backdrop. LOVE that! Create once, use 3 times!
Next up was making Monster Slime! The kids got really into it!
Simple ingredients get magically transformed into gooey slime! Here are the instructions and if you want to print and use for your own party, just click the image, download and print. It’s set up to have 4 per page. I put one of these in their goodie bags so they can make it again at home.
A few days before the party, the girls and I made this colorful monstar pinata and filled it with candy for the kids to attack. I also had craft supplies set up so they could make cute monstar puppets.
For a fun treat, we made these cute Monstermallow Pops – marchmallows dipped in melted candy melts and decorated with colorful sprinkles and candy eyes (found in the cake decorating section at Party City)
At the end of the party, the kids went a little crazy with a confetti toss! Yes – confetti everywhere! Fortunately for me, my daughter LIKES to clean so this was like an extra birthday bonus for her! Break out that broom!!
I hope you try one of these ideas for Halloween. They can easily be adapted to be scary rather than cute. For example for the slime – make it blood red! We did that for my older daughter’s party. Eeeek!!
What do you do to celebrate Halloween?
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