Halloween Birthday Bash For my daughter's 5th birthday, she desperately wanted a Halloween party, but her birthday is in May, so after Halloween we began buying up everything on sale and discount (and pretty much filled our dining room with Halloween decor for 6 months!). On the day of the party, we decorated our entire sunroom. I bought up rolls of chalkboard paper at the local teaching supply store, and covered all the windows with black paper for the ground. Then I made cut up empty cereal boxes into tombstomes with silly names on them (U.R.Stinky, etc) and taped those to the black paper to look like a mini graveyard. I then hung bats all over the place, as well as white yarn from the ceiling which creates a nice web for the spiders which I made out of styrofoam balls, toothpicks, and chenille stems (just paint the balls black, and paint 2 red eyes on one of the balls, stick 2 or 3 balls together with the toothpicks in the center, and use black chenille stems for the legs). I also purchased 90% off at Joanns after Halloween a couple of Halloween costumes which I was able to stuff and hang around the room to add to the decor. My daughter also loves The Nightmare Before Christmas (as she was the skeleton king for the previous Halloween), so I purchased a large styrofoam ball and cut it in half. I then glued each half to a poster board, and then I free-hand painted Jack and Sally, the main characters in the movie. (these were great decorations, and she still has them in her bedroom) I also bought at Oriental Trading these adorable little bucket hats which were either vampires, mummies, witches, or frankenstein monsters for the kids to wear since it was May, and I didn't want them to have to dig out their costumes--they were able to take these home as one of their goodies. Also since it was May, and May in Florida is already pretty humid, I had a little inflatable pool out front for the little kids, and a triple slip n slide for the big kids when they grew tired of being frightened. The games included--the Monster Mash. This was a circle I'd made using streamers in the grass, then we filled up water balloons and put little squishy monster/bug prizes in a select few of them. The kids had to stomp on the balloons to find the prizes. We also had Find Skully Scavenger Hunt. For this game, I had collected toilet paper rolls and then using newspaper to stuff the ends (to look like bones), we paper machied them and painted them all white. I then hid them all over the yard. When it was time for the game, I brought out this toy skull decoration, and told the kids we had to find the rest of 'Skully's' body! The kids loved this game the best! They thought the bones were so cool, and they had a great time collecting all the bones. Our final game was the Graveyard Dig. I had a second inflatable pool that I filled with dirt (from the dollar store) and I had painted ping pong balls like eyeballs. I stuck them all throughout the dirt and the kids were instructed to find the most eyeballs. They had a lot of fun. When the games were over, the kids could dine on "fried grubs" (chicken nuggets), "snake eggs" (grapes, red and green),"mummy fingers" (sausages wrapped in crossants), "beetle wings" (lay's potato chips), or they could enjoy some witches brew (this was fruit punch in a black cauldron with ice cubes that were shaped like hands--I made the ice cubes by filling up plastic gloves with water and freezing them). For dessert, I made a mummy cake, which literally was a cake shaped like a mummy and I used one of those special tips to create the white strips of icing. A good time was had by all!