Maia's monsters and princesses birthday party was a blast. We held the party at a playground, as we did last year, which worked out well. The kids had plenty of room to run around and play, the weather was beautiful (lucky us), and there were three picnic tables to corral into food and craft tables.
I loved seeing the costumes! Maia started out in her purple monster costume, Gil and Nathan are both dressed as knights. Nathan's "arms" are vacuum attachments! :) There were many princesses as well, of course, and one other monster.
At one of the craft tables, I set up a "decorate your own crown" activity, with crowns cut out of poster board (using this template) and various inexpensive "jewels" to glue or stick on. The table is covered with the contractor's paper that I buy at Lowes and use as a substitute for butcher paper. It provided a clean surface to work on and also protected the table from our glue and other craft supplies.
At the other craft table, kids could design their own monsters. I bought this monster kit from Discount School Supply for the party. I don't usually go in for kits, but this one looked perfect for the party, and was very open-ended in terms of how the monsters are put together, which is important to me.
I actually ended up cutting out extra bodies from colored poster board when I realized at the last minute that I didn't have enough to go around, but there were so many body parts included in the kit that it was fine. I threw in some googly eyes from our stash as well.
I loved seeing the kids' creations! These were made by 2-year-old Asher.
Maia changed into a princess half way through the party, as some of you predicted, and spent the rest of the time running around in the "woods" with some of the other kids
and playing in the sandbox in her fancy dress. I believe the birthday girl had fun! And hope everyone else did as well.
Thanks to Molly for taking many of these pictures!
