A Monster Mash

This was the invitation the kids made this year to invite their friends to our first Halloween Party at our new house. We had a really fun planning session over the weekend and got to have Emily's friend Kaitlyn help us plan.

The kids looked through my collection of Halloween magazines and my idea folder (I am a collector of creative ideas...the only thing I don't purge in my home). They chose these cool pumpkin invitations. We collected cool Halloween do-dads for them to roll into the crepe paper. When their friends opened up the pumpkin they were surprised by spiders, skull rings, pumpkin erasers, stickers and other fun stuff. They made them all by themselves (except the stems and ribbons). The hardest part is always making the invite list. The kids had such a rich kid environment in Dupont. They have sooo many friends. I try to limit them to a certain number of families each. I think next year we will have to go smaller. Surprisingly as the kids and their friends get older they get more unruly.

Then the kids looked for cool Halloween food dishes to assign to each family. I think this is always their favorite part. It is fun to imagine all the cool stuff that will soon grace our table when party day arrives.

Another really hard part is always choosing the activities for the party. There are so many things the kids want to do every year. I let them each pick an activity this year. I think everyone had a great time with the games they chose.

All but one family made it to the party. What an awesome turn out we had. It was a really awesome night. And I had lots of, "your the best Mom ever" afterwards.

This is the group of party goers for 2009. The Phillips family came late and so they are not pictured.

Just some of the really yummy goodies everyone brought.

Donuts on a string was Chase's choice!

Emily chose to play charades.

Katie wanted to play Halloween Bingo.

I wanted to have a pinata. The kids and I made this a really awesome bat pinata. It was way stronger than I though tit would be too. It made it through almost everyone getting two turns. One with a blind fold the next turn without.

Kaitlyn got to chose a game too. She wanted to have a bat hunt. Unfortunately it rained all day. So I had to come up with something else. We blew up clear balloons and put glowing light sticks in them. The kids had a balloon stomp and then a light dance to Halloween music all in the dark!

I think the most memorable part though was when we lost our electricity. And I had 35 kids running around bumping into each other and screaming! Wow! Didn't plan on that one...