Oh hey, come on in.
Here we are again: Halloween weekend. (Or, pre-Halloween weekend. Could we please all agree that Halloween should fall on a Saturday one hundred percent of the time so that none of us have to deal with convincing four year olds high on Sugar Babies and mini Snickers that no seriously, it’s time to go to bed?)
Aaaanyway, if you’re having a Halloween party you’re probably having it this weekend, so I wanted to share some shots of my son’s (spooky) 5th birthday party, along with a few activity and recipe ideas.
Bloody Slugs! Aw.
The Food and Drinks: I went with my go-to policy of making one or two cool-looking things…and then putting zero effort into the rest. I made my son a Spooky Ghost fondant cake, and used the remnants to make Bloody Slugs (which sound disgusting, but are strangely adorable, no? Recipe coming up), and then ordered a bunch of pizzas, threw some Trader Joe’s Pinot Grigio and Fruitable juice boxes in the refrigerator, and called it a day.
Hi there, hair extensions from 2009!
The Activities: I usually try to schedule at least three easy activities for a kids’ party, just so there’s something to distract them with when they start getting too crazy. For this one, I went with:
- Bobbing for Apples (so retro, so fun)
- Assorted kid-friendly board games set up around the house
- The Body Parts Game (pictured above): I set up a black sheet so it hung down around a table, cut holes in the fabric, and then set bowls with the following “body parts” behind the sheet, where the kids could reach through the holes and feel them (but not see them).
- Teeth (unpopped corn kernels)
- Witch’s Hair (one of my old hair extensions, soaked in water. EW. Also yay for finally being able to use those things again, albeit for a slightly different purpose.)
- Bones (uncooked penne and a faux skeleton hand from Michael’s)
- Brains (the byproduct of my wildly unsuccessful Jello Worms experiment)
- Spiders (ok, so technically not a body part, but very easy to replicate with pipe cleaners)
- Snakeskins (also technically not a body part, but my children love seaweed and seaweed feels like snakeskin, so that worked out well)
The Decor: I made a kind of awesome centerpiece using faux moss, plastic eyeballs, spooky candles, and purple and white fairy light strings, and then forgot to take a photograph of it, le sigh. (You can kind of see it in the photos of the cake, though.) I also turned my son’s room into the “Spooky Zone” (blacklights, spiderwebs everywhere, and a “cave” made out of sheets), and added faux spiderwebs to everything else in our house that I could get to stand still.
P.S. I loved everything about this party, but my favorite part had to be the fact that my husband dressed up as The Man, resulting in me trying to explain to an assembly of elementary schoolers the difference between “Da Man” (like, “you da man”) and “The Man,” thereby also affording me the opportunity to give them an early lesson in the importance of resisting authority. (Except, you know, your parents. Always listen to your parents.)
