Elizabeth's party

I seem to be a week behind in life.  Oh well, I'm finally posting about Elizabeth's party even if I'm late.

Since her birthday is 4 days before Halloween, she decided she wanted a Halloween costume party.  

So first decorations:

 

These decorations are pumpkin punching balls and will later double as a game:

  I didn't get many pictures of the games since I was too busy helping with games.  We invited 13 kids besides my own.  I think about 10 of them showed up so there were a lot of kids and they needed extra help.  So I have very few pictures of the first few games.

We played Pumpkin Cootie.  We played the same rules as Cootie but used pumpkins instead.  So if you roll a 1, you get a pumpkin body... 2, eyes, etc.  When they had all their parts, they could make a pumpkin.  I used self-adhesive foam so we didn't have to deal with glue.  Worked great!  This game took a lot longer than I planned.

Then we played a version of "the candy bar game", only we used Halloween rubber duckies because I wanted to avoid more sugar at this time of year.  The kids LOVED this game and played it forever.  I'd tell them we needed to move on, but they all insisted we keep playing.  And if you're not familiar with the candy bar game, here's how you play.  Each kid gets a paper bag.  Put all items in the middle - in this case ducks.  When someone rolls a 5 (usually we say if they roll a 6, but since Elizabeth is 5, we changed the rules) they get to pick something from the middle.  The next person rolls and if they get a 5, they can pick from the middle OR they can steal someone else's duck if they remember who has what and are correct.  I had extra ducks to make sure everyone got at least one.  Some ended up with more, which we said was ok and everyone seemed fine with that - no feelings hurt.

 Then we were supposed to decorate trick or treat bags with glow-in-the-dark fabric paint.  But we ran out of time and no one seemed to care that we didn't do this activity (well, they didn't know about it anyway).  So I took back all the supplies and saved $27.  

After all that sitting, they needed to get the wiggles out.  Here's where the pumpkin decorations came into play.  I cut the string and let them fall all over the kids (they loved it) and then they could each pick a pumpkin punching bag.  We took them downstairs where they danced to Halloween music and generally acted crazy.  

 

Then we had a "haunted house".  This was held in Nathan's room since (as we learned with Anna's party) he has the most open space that can easily be darkened.  I spray painted shoe boxes with black spray paint, cut a hole in them and added some black fabric so they couldn't see what was in them, but they could still put their hands in.  They got to feel "eye balls" (boiled eggs), "blood" (pudding), "brains" (cold spaghetti), "skin" (tortillas), and "hearts" (jello). 

I had "spooky eyes" that flashed and I had some motion sensitive strobe lights that made spooky sounds.  I wanted it "fun scary" not "scary scary" and it worked.  They were sufficiently freaked out, but not scared.  Michael wanted to hide in the closet and scare them and I let him for the big kids.

 

Then it was time for cake.   Here's the table.

 Singing "Happy Birthday"

 

So far so good, until... Blake accidently poked Elizabeth in the eye with the cake as he was putting it on the table.  He didn't realize he did it and in the middle of "Happy Birthday", Elizabeth burst into tears.

You can see her red eye here.  She couldn't open it for awhile and it was all red.  The poor kid!  Blake says she's the probably the only person who can say she's been poked in the eye with a birthday cake.  And she'll probably remember that for the rest of her life.  We sang to her again so she could enjoy it, rather than cry.

Then we opened presents.  There were already parents there at that point.  I had the part only last 1.5 hours because I didn't want to end up with restless kids and nothing to do.  I've learned that little kid parties are better if they're a little shorter.

I think she had fun (aside from the cake injury).