Movie Night Birthday Party

We've decided that we aren't going to do big birthday parties for our girls every year.  There's just no way we can afford it, plus they are a lot of work for this busy mom!  But, of course, we love to celebrate birthdays!  And Kaylee really wanted to do a little something with her friends this year for her birthday.  So we decided to do a movie night birthday party!  I figured that was easy enough-play a movie, provide some treats, birthday fun!  Well, if you have followed my blog for a while now you know that I can get carried away.  There must be some kind of support group for this kind of problem!  {smile}  I just can't help myself!

The week before the movie night I started looking around on Pinterest & came across all sorts of cute, simple ideas for our party.  And, hence, got a little carried away...

I made a party invitation in the digital design program I always use which is My Digital Studio from Stampin' Up!  I love how it turned out & I just printed them out in 5"x7" size at Costco:

Then I used my Silhouette machine to print & cut out some "Admit One" tickets.  We wrote each girls' name on the ticket & simply stapled it to the invitation & then dropped them off to our friends' houses:

I made a movie poster & clipped it on our easel at the entrance to our "movie theater."  My daughter had picked Tangled to watch that night so I printed out a picture of the movie cover off the Internet & glued it on there:

I attempted to make a "theater" feeling in our family room by draping our TV cabinet in red plastic tablecloths:

So you could see through the plastic tablecloths a little, but it was a really cheap idea so I wasn't going to be too picky about it!

For our movie night treats we had a concession stand, of course:

Every girl received 3 blue tickets when they arrived at the party so that they could buy some treats at the concession stand.  Each item cost 1 ticket.  I made a "concession stand" poster to show some of the goodies they could "buy" & also to be a decoration:

We had popcorn:

 (I found the little cardboard popcorn boxes at Target.)

We had candy:

 (I saw this idea on Pinterest of putting the movie candy in these little containers.  I just printed out some decorative circles, punched them out & then wrote the names of the candy on them to attach on the lids.  My husband thought I was crazy for doing this because he said most of our party guests can't read yet anyway, but I thought it was such a cute idea!  And I like how I could make the perfect kid-sized portions for our movie night.)

We also had soda:

 (Caffeine free, of course!  And I love those little cans!)

I covered an empty baby formula can with some scrapbook paper & added a little "tickets" label.  Then I cut a slot into the lid so that the girls could put their tickets into the can when they "bought" something at the concession stand:

I started thinking that the likelihood of 10 little girls sitting through the entire Tangled movie wasn't good.  I decided to have at least one game ready to play to keep them entertained.  I found a great "Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Rider" game online.  She provides a printable frying pan where all you have to do is print & cut it out, but then you have to draw your own "wanted" poster.  Luckily one of my husband's hidden talents is that he can draw really well!

So he drew the poster for our game:

The birthday girl got to go first:

And little sister, Aidynn, went last.  But you can see the frying pans in this photo:

I had also decided to bake some cupcakes so that we would have something we could stick a candle into so we could sing happy birthday to Kaylee.  I decided on these delicious hostess imitation cupcakes:

They fit with our concession stand theme, plus these are seriously some of our all-time favorite cupcakes!  And they're really easy to make too!

I also got the idea online to print out a few Tangled coloring pages to give the girls as their thank you for coming goody along with a set of inexpensive watercolors (since Rapunzel loves to paint, ya know):

I am so happy with how everything turned out.  And really, honestly, it came together quickly & was fairly inexpensive & best of all the girls had a blast!  Maybe we'll just do movie night every year for birthdays!