McKibben Halloween Monster Mash

On Monday Oct. 28th, we had our family Halloween Party.  This year's theme was "Monsters".  As I was looking for ideas for the party, I kept seeing fun activities and food centered around cute monsters, so I thought that would make a cute theme.  I usually don't have themes for Halloween parties, but I thought it would be fun!  

 The invitation that I made for all of the kids.  I think Noah carried his around for days.

 This was the before we started with the costume game.  Everyone holding their bags wondering which costume they were going to be this year.  Bella looks mad, but that's her new thing.  She either doesn't like to smile for pictures or makes a really weird face. 

Introducing....

SUPERMAN!!!

 Doc McStuffins

 A Honey Bee

 Cleopatra

 The Iron Chef

 Vampire

 And very mismatched '80's chick

I really somehow wanted us all to dress up as different monsters, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.  I think these worked better anyways.  

The Dinner

 Our Monster Table

 Getting ready to serve up the monster grub.  

Monster Menu

 I didn't do a very good job of taking pictures of the food as I was making it, so I snapped a picture before I sat down to eat.  

Going through the menu:

 the monster drool was the drink and I found a pineapple lemonade that was really good and I dyed it green. 

Monster head was cornbread that I cut with a Frankenstein's head cookie cutter.  (It's the top middle thing) 

Monster belly lint was cream cheese and bacon balls that were covered in shredded cheddar cheese (pictured below).  They really weren't very good, but I thought they made good belly lint.  :)

Monster arms were probably my favorite.  They were the noodles coming out of the hot dogs.  Before you cook them, you stick spaghetti (I used linguini, so the arms looked thicker) into cut up hot dogs and then you cook them and they look like this:

I think they were my kid's favorites, too.  

Monster eyeballs were the cookies.  

They looked incredibly cute, but they didn't taste that great.  

And last of all were the Monster boogers...nice!  They were meatballs in sauce.  The sauce oddly enough was bbq sauce and grape jelly.  That's it...nice and easy and they tasted pretty good too.  

Decoration

I was meaning to make this door decoration before the kids got home from school to have it as part of our party decorations, but I was behind in getting ready for the party.  So I gave that job to Lydia to do and she made this cute monster guy.  

Games

We started off with 2 different, but similar games, both called "Feed the Monster". 

 I made monsters on 2 sides of a box and cut out holes for the mouths.  This way 2 kids could play at once.  All they did was roll marbles or bouncy balls or whatever kind of ball, and try to get it through the monster's mouth.  It was fun for the little kids.  

 Then we took the Monster and set it at an angle.  Then we gathered up our victims--Little People--and tossed them to the monster to feed him.  

Our next game was to catch little monsters in a web. 

 This is the web that I created out of masking tape.  We needed one side sticky to catch our monsters. 

 I found these cute little plush monsters at Oriental Trading Company, and I found that they would be perfect for our game.  If you threw them just right, they would stick to the tape.  

 Our next game was Monster "Glow in the Dark" Bowling.  Bella helped me make our Monsters before the other kids got home from school that day.  Right before we bowled, we put in glow sticks.  

 I thought they looked really cool in the dark.  We did bowl in the dark, but it was hard to take pictures in the dark, so we did some both ways.  

Our next game was "Building Your Own Monster"

I had cut out various body shapes and given one to each of the kids.  They were each given a dice and they had to roll the dice to see what kind of body part they were adding.  Polka dots, eyes, mouths, horns/antennae, teeth or fur.  Then they rolled again to see how many of that item to add.  If they rolled a one and added polka dots, even if they rolled a one again, they couldn't add any more polka dots.  

Lydia was funny and didn't play exactly according to the rules.  She kind of altered hers so it would look the way she wanted it.  Which turned out to be cute.  

The finished monsters. 

Our last game was called "Monster Brain Scavenger Hunt".  My sister did this last year with her kids and I just loved it.  It took quite a bit of preparation, but I think my kids really enjoyed it.  

 First I had to prepare the monster brains...aka...colored spaghetti.  I love how the colors look.

Then I hid 11 treasures into each one and gave them the list of things to find.  

 Ready to start searching their monster brains.

 Noah ready to dig in

 I love his face in this one..."you want me to stick my hands in there?"

 Lydia started getting a little crazy with hers.   

 Trying to find them with her teeth

 Found an eyeball!

 After they found all their treasures, they just wanted to play with the spaghetti.  How often do they get to do that?  

So, that was the end of our party.  Poor Maggie...everything is geared to the little kids and she plays a long and is a good sport.  Maybe next year she'll have time to help me plan it and run the games.  It's hard when there's such a big age gap.  But, it was a fun night!