We had a "Finding Nemo" party for my youngest son's first birthday. INVITATIONS:
I used some cool glittery bubble turquoise scrapbook paper for the invitations. I decorated them with sea life stickers and sparkly blue-green scrapbook paper cut into seaweed shapes. I wrote "SWIM ON OVER" on the front. On the back, I wrote "Dive into _____'s 1st birthday party! Port: location, Departure Date, Dive Time, S.O.S.: RSVP #, and SEA you soon! at the bottom. I put a Nemo sticker on the back as well. I put a little blue tinsel in the envelope with the invitation. CAKE: For the cake, I tinted the frosting with blue and green food coloring and left it kind of streaky on purpose. I put candy rocks on the bottom of the cake for the bottom of the ocean. I used streaky green apple fruit leather for seaweed. I put assorted gummy sea life (octopus, sharks, different size fish) all over the cake with a large orange juju fish in the middle as Nemo. DECORATIONS: The tables had turquoise and orange tablecloths and plates. I used Finding Nemo cake plates. I decorated with green, dark blue, and turquoise crepe streamers in the doorways. I also hung construction paper sea life on the windows and doors. I put blue tinsel with shells in the middle of the main table and various sea life candle holders and toys on the other tables. I also put sea life stuffed animals on the couches. I checked out the Finding Nemo CD from our library and had it playing in the background. We also had the Finding Nemo DVD playing one of the aquarium scenes on the TV. GAMES: I took some old socks, filled them with rice, knotted them, and cut a tail behind the knot. I then drew faces on the "fish." I set some sand pails, from biggest to smallest, in a line in front of the kids. The closest largest pail was worth 1 point, and the farthest smallest was worth 10. I would recommend filling the pails with a little clean sand so they don't tip over. I had planned to make a stick, string and clothespin fishing pole for the kids to fish for Nemo/sea life stickers. I would have been hiding behind a sheet hung on the clothesline in the corner of the yard and tugged on the line once I'd put the stickers in the clothespin. I also was going to have the kids make octopus/jelly fish out of a paper plate cut in half. The kids would glue streamers to the cut edge of the shiny side of the plate and then draw a face on the other, non-shiny side. If more kids had come, I was going to have them play fish, fish, shark (duck, duck, goose) and tag with Bruce. "Bruce" tries to tag the other kids, and when he does, they hold his hand to become an even bigger Bruce. If it had been a little warmer, I was going to fill the kiddie pool with water so the kids could use their fish squirts as squirt guns to cool each other off. FOOD: I made a big glass bowl of blue Jello with gummy sea life (again, sharks, octopus and various size fish) and twisted green fruit leather for seaweed. The kids loved it. We also had goldfish crackers and other regular, non-theme food. For drinks, we had Capri-Sun 100% juice Apple Splash and Fruit Dive Fruit Waves juice packs. PARTY FAVORS: Because I didn't want the Nemo/sea life stickers to get ruined in the small cellophane treat bags, I thought it was best to have them separate for something like the fishing game. I put the other favors in some tropical fish bags from Oriental Trading Company. First I put some blue tinsel in the bottoms of the bags. I filled the bags with fish sunglasses, fish squirts and fish slinkies from OTC. I also included some shark fruit snacks.