Cookie Monster 2 Year Old Birthday Party

Hi again, thanks for coming back! This post is prompted by an e-mail I received from a birthday blogger at www.thebirthdayblog.net who is featuring my post about Kerrick's Cars party on her site on March 12th. Wow, that is exciting for me! It's cool to have someone appreciate your ideas enough to want to share them with others. I had told her about the Cookie Monster and ladybug parties I have also had and said I would work on new posts for those to send to her. So here is the Cookie Monster Party I threw for Krisalyn's 2nd Birthday.

I made the invitations, I folded blue card stock in half and then cut out a circle but didn't cut all the way so the fold was still on the top. This made a circle that opened on the fold.  I typed the inside of the invitation onto brown card stock and cut out a circle the same way around the words. I glued the brown circle inside the blue one. I glued large googly eyes on the outside top of the circle, and cut out a black mouth from card stock and glued that on. And thus you have Cookie Monster with a cookie in his mouth! 

I decided to make a Tutu for Krisalyn to wear.  From the tutu stemmed a shirt, and pigtail holders to match. For the shirt I cut out a Cookie Monster shaped head from blue fabric, and painted with fabric paint a black mouth, and glued on with fabric glue 2 large googly eyes. My great neighbor did the actual sewing, I haven't gotten into my sewing machine yet, but plan too in the near future when time allows! Here is the complete outfit.

When I decided on the Cookie Monster theme I wasn't aware that finding just C. Monster decorations was going to be so hard. I found lots of decor out there with other characters on it, but I wanted just Cookie.  I started with blue and white for the table coverings, cups and napkins. Then I searched Etsy, and found a few die cut decorations. However, they are expensive when you buy them there, how I wished at that point that I had a machine to cut out my own.  I found the cheapest ones I could and purchased those. For other decorations I bought a package of blue paper in different hues. I then looked for coloring pages online and printed out the coloring pages with C. Monster onto the blue paper.  I cut out the C. Monsters and glued googly eyes onto them.  They came out super cute and were inexpensive, and easy to make.  I made a Happy 2nd Birthday Krisalyn Banner, and a chocolate chip cookie banner. I hung the cookie banner across the mantle, and put wooden alphabet blocks we had on the mantle with Krisalyn spelled out with the blocks, then placed piles of the blocks around for extra decor.  On the front door as guests were coming in I had a 123 Sesame Street sign that I got on Etsy. As you know every episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by a letter and a number.  On the inside of the door I had 2 signs for when people were leaving that said Today's party was brought to you by the Letter K (for Krisalyn) and the number 2 since she was turning 2. Again just coloring pages printed onto colored paper. I splurged and bought one big C Monster balloon a few latex blue and white ones, and then the dollar store had white and blue mylar star balloons. Here are the decorations!

These decorations were the printable coloring pages! Cut them out and add goggly eyes!

The activities for the kids I came up with were to paint cookies, and make C. Monster puppets on popsicle sticks. I had come across the painting idea in one of my cookie cookbooks and had thought what a cool birthday party activity. Each kid got one C Monster shaped cookie and another shape to paint. The kids had fun doing them.  I had the cookies frosted with a  white glaze that is great for painting on, and used food coloring for the paint. I think next time I would water it down though as when the kids ate the cookies their mouths turned all sorts of weird colors! The C Monster puppets were just a C Monster head shape cut out of blue card stock that I drew the black mouth shape onto, and blue and black tissue paper strips that the kids crumpled up and glued onto the appropriate area of the blue head. I had the heads glued onto the sticks already with each kids name written on the backs of the sticks. I had the tissue paper strips and 2 googly eyes along with the popsicle stick in ziploc bags for each child ready to go.  We also played pin the chocolate chip on the cookie game. I got a brown round tablecloth and taped it to the wall, we drew a circle into the middle of it and whoever got it closest to the circle won. By the end it looked like a huge chocolate chip cookie! Here is that fun!

My husband would say you can never have too many cookies, and since the party was from 2-4 I knew  I didn't have to serve a meal. So we went with just cookies, and cake pops! I wanted cookies for the different characters on the show. I found a C. Monster cookbook that had a couple of good options, but I added more.  Here are the different kinds of cookies I came up with. My Mother-in-law made the signs for each type of cookie using stickers and markers! We also had blue punch, and blue popcorn too! Instead of a cake, you guessed it, we had a giant cookie cake. I freehanded a C. Monster onto the cake and used the Wilton tip #233 to make him look furry, gave him big globs of white frosting eyes, and black goggly spots!

I love making red velvet cookies, these are made with a cake mix, butter, 2 eggs,  and white chocolate chips!

This one was in the cookbook.

I got this recipe a long time ago for K-bars and thought they matched our K-girls theme nicely!

My husband's favorite cookie is the spritz cookie, so I tinted the dough blue for Grover!

These cute nest cookies were in a cookie book I had and I thought they were perfect for Big Bird's nest!

These carrot cake cookies were in the cookbook, but I added The Count's name to them.

Just Blue Hawaiian Punch, lime sherbet and ginger ale

I happened to be walking into Michael's one day and noticed some blue plastic sand buckets and sand toys that were on clearance! I snagged all I could find! I knew I would use these for the favors. I painted acrylic paint C. Monster faces onto them. Each kid's name was painted on the back of the sand bucket.  I filled them with mostly things from the dollar store, and anything blue I could find, Sesame Street coloring books, great pinwheels that were 3 for a dollar, a blue airhead, a blue old fashioned candy stick, a blue pixie stick, Rice Krispy Treats, blue glow bracelets, and Welch's fruit snacks (cause they are in blue packaging.) Each kid also got a sand toy (.60 each) It was a really fun favor for me to make and I think the kids liked them a lot!

I have been to parties before where kids didn't really want to wear party hats, but I think a bunch of munchkins sitting around a table with corny hats on is adorable! I took a package from Party City of different colored hats, and realized that they all corresponded to a character on Sesame Street.  If I could have found all blue I would have gotten them. Realizing the correspondence got me painting them to look like those characters. I used left over googly eyes for them.  Can I just say the kids wore these for most of the party and some kids even left with them still on.  They LOVED them!

I knew this post would be a long one, I just had so many fun ideas for this party! Thanks for sticking with me through it! A SUPER BIG thanks to my Mother-in-law who helped me with the last minute details the night before and helped decorate the house. I hope if you were thinking about a Cookie Monster party, that this inspired you! If you want any of the recipes for any of the cookies leave a comment and I will get it to you! Have a fun filled day!

Cars Birthday Party for a 4 year Old

Some people like my husband, would say I go overboard on birthday parties for my kids. I say I do just enough to make sure they know they are special, and that the day they were born was a wonderful day in my life. Growing up we had birthday parties, not as extravagant as I throw, but all of it was done by my Mother, Helen. She made the cakes always from scratch, with love, and spent many late nights decorating them. As much as some don't want to admit they are just like their mothers, I am just like mine, and that's a good thing.  I start decorating my cakes late at night and typically finish in the wee hours of the mornings. This birthday party was no exception, although I think I was done decorating this cake by midnight thanks to Wilton's sugar sheets. It was other prepping that kept me up much later.  I think I could easily take 3 months to plan a party as I like to do everything I possibly can by myself.  I have made every invitation for all birthday parties thus far, make as many decorations as I can myself, do my own cakes, and food.  Party planning is part of my new business at Carolina Swag Bags. The Disney Cars Birthday Party was going to be one of those WAY over the top parties because my son is enthralled with the movies. He has more die cast Cars cars than any others. As we were deciding which ones we would use for the party my husband and I decided it was really ridiculous how many he has, but we enjoy buying them for him, and they were great motivation for potty training and sleeping in his bed all night! We had the party at our church in a large room and it was the best idea we could have had! We wouldn't have had room to accommodate the "racetrack" we made out of black table plastic with 3 lanes for racing cars down with yellow stripes made out of yellow duct tape. Here is the picture of our track.

The kids had a blast using my sons' Cars pull-back cars and Shake-n-Go cars and racing them down the  track.  We had heats and winners.  It was a big hit! The church had the orange cones they use for parking so we just borrowed those to put around the track.

When the kids arrived we had a table set up with name tags that had Secret Agent on the top of them. This was the Secret Agent Verification, as I wasn't sure how many kids were coming and didn't know all the parents so it was a way to give out a number to a kid and a parent to make sure the kid went home with the right parent. Here are the invitations and the secret agent verification table

We decided to put all those cars that we have purchased to good use and make "movie scenes" out of them, so I wrapped up some flat empty boxes (and a board game) in black and red paper and put movie scene on the box and we recreated scenes from the movies to decorate our tables with. Here are the movie scenes. Definitely a cheap way to decorate your tables!

For all the food items we used movie themes as well. The food was at Flo's V8 Cafe, drinks were Red's Watering Can, and Fillmore's Organic Fuel, the cake table was Sarge's Surplus of Sweets. We had Luigi's Casa Della Tires with the leaning tower of tires (chocolate covered donuts,) we had Sheriff's Traffic light rice crispy treats which were simply chocolate covered on one side with red yellow and green m&m's for the lights, and we had chocolate dipsticks, that were just chocolate covered pretzel rods. I didn't think all of this up on my own but got some ideas from other Cars themed party blogs I had read. Here are those items.

At Flo's V8 Cafe we had Sally's Salsa, Doc's Guac, Mater's Tater's (potato Chips,) Frank's Fruit, and Flo's Franks.

Radiator Springs wouldn't be complete without Sally's Cozy Cone Motel, Radiator Springs Curios, and Ramone's House of Body Art. I got 6 small orange cones and placed them on one table for the motel and the "curios" were the gift favor bags for the kids. We had a small table set up with temporary tattoos for the kids at Ramone's.

Each kid designed their own race car magnet which was a piece of wood in the shape of a race car (29 cents each at Michaels) that I glued a magnet onto the back of with Gorilla Glue (that stuff is awesome if you haven't used it before.) After the acrylic (fast drying) paint dried we put a clear coat varnish on them. (Thanks Brittney!)

I started looking for inspiration for this cake on the internet. There were definitely some fun Cars cakes out there.  I knew that black, white and red would be the main colors, with a splash of yellow for punch. After making cute cake pops for my son's actual birthday at school I got inspired to do this cake; here are the cake pops and the finish line cake!

 The Dollar Tree was great for items for the favor bags with Cars 2 having just been released recently there were plenty of items to choose from for the bags. On Etsy I found cute stickers that were personalized to put on the bottoms of Hershey Kisses, that had a picture of a Cars 2 character and Happy 4th Birthday Kerrick on them, these were very inexpensive on Etsy I think $5.50 including shipping for 96 of them. I also got cellophane favor bags and alternated red yellow and brown M&M's in them with a favor tag tied with ribbon that said "Thanks for coming to my party" with my son's name in the middle of them, these were also on Etsy. I put a sticker on the back of one of the M&M's favor tags and whoever got that favor won a special prize.

My husband would say that the kids would have been happy with just racing all the cars and crashing them around for the 2 hours that the party was, and he is probably right. Many would say I go overboard, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, but can I just say that planning a party like this and being able to use my creative bones God gave me, makes me a very happy person. Besides the smile on my kids faces when they see all I have come up with for them makes every late night of planning and cake decorating worth it!