Monster Bash

Our boys have birthdays one month apart. This year with the birth of Nora,  I decided to do a combined birthday party. 

I love parties.  I spend most of the year thinking about & looking for birthday party ideas.  This year I decided a Monster party  would be super fun.  In the age of Pinterest, party planning is really easy. 

In order to avoid interrupting family time,  I did our party on a Wednesday morning at a nearby park.  We had 19 kids (including babies),  7 moms. I only invited our Bible study, our preschool co-op & one neighbor.  We have a wonderful church with tons of friends but I had to do what I could to keep it to a reasonable size.

We had just a few activities.  One was make a monster.  I made playdoh & gave each child a chunk.  Then,  I set our pipe cleaners,  googly eyes & beads.  The kids loved this activities. They came up with cool creations.

We also had a photo "booth" where the kids could become a monster. I plan to print them & get them to their moms.  I thought that was kind of a fun keepsake. The photo booth doubled as a bean bag toss. Three kids also enjoyed that.  The rest of the time the kids played at the park.

I tried to keep everything as monstrous as possible.  I bought hole reinforcers & used them as eyes on party hats and juice boxes.  A but of black sharpie to make the pupil & mouths. I also used yarn & added silly hair to the hats.  The hats were well received.

I saw the cupcake idea on Pinterest.  Unfortunately,  I asked Bob to buy gummy lifesavers instead of those peach slice things.the gummy lifesavers did not fit around dum dum suckers so I used lollipop sticks (bought at hobby lobby) &stuck them thru the lifesaver. I then used a bit of white frosting & added a chocolate chip to create an eye.

As takeaways, I made monsters out of some clearance fabric,  buttons & rick rack.  They turned out really cute!

My super sweet hubs,  designed the boys matching monster shirts with their name & age.  I usually order them from Etsy but didn't want to spend $25 per shirt.  We had leftover printable iron on sheets from three shirts we did for Nora’s birth.  We bought those at target.  I think i spent $10 on those (we've done 5 shirts) & the shirts were  3.50 at hobby lobby.

The party was great but I am so tired. I was up too late for too many nights working on it in addition to a new baby.  But it was worth it to see my two sweet boys smile!  Ollie told me hits favorite part was everything.

I'm thankful for my mother-in-law who came & got the boys ready while I set up & then came to help with Nora during the party.