Elmo Birthday Party

Easy to follow tips for hosting an easy to do Elmo themed Birthday Party.

Invitations
Make goldfish invitations in honor of Elmo's fish Dorthy. Cut out fish shapes on orange construction paper and have your child help you glue googly eyes on the front. Using a marker write all the party details inside.

Birthday Decorations
Most children love balloons. Use primary colors; yellow, red, and blue to brighten up the party area. For an added touch use crepe paper, an Elmo pinata., and a large Mylar Elmo balloon. Children love to look at the larger than life Elmo. I filled the Elmo pinata with smarties, lollipops, fruit snacks, and stickers. Having gone to see Sesame Street Live recently I was able to have some of the pictures I had taken of Elmo and friends enlarged. They were enlarged to the size of a poster and we hung these on our doors (both inside and out) as decorations.

You can purchase an Elmo party kit; Elmo themed party hats, plates, cups, and napkins. In an effort to save money I purchased your basic red plates, cups, and party hats. I decorated the party hats with Elmo stickers for a more festive look. I splurged on two packs of Elmo themed napkins. Each pack contained 12 napkins.

Party Food
How about ordering Elmo's favorite food, pizza! Most children love pizza and it involves no prep time. I also had individual boxes of gold fish crackers and Elmo juice boxes (by Apple and Eve) for each child. I purchased an Elmo cookie cutter so I could make Jell-O Elmos.

Birthday Cake
In lieu of a traditional birthday cake I baked chocolate chip cookies (hey they are good enough for Cookie Monster). Then we had the children decorate their own vanilla Elmo cupcake. We used red frosting and sprinkles and each cupcake had an Elmo foil wrapper.

If you prefer the more traditional Birthday cake you can get one decorated for a fair price at your local grocery store. Even if you are not a baker you can always bake one yourself and place on top an inexpensive Elmo figurine.

Fun Activities
I purchased a few Elmo colorings books and the children were able to decorate them with glitter and other fun craft objects. If you cannot find an Elmo coloring book you can print Elmo color sheets for free online.

Besides decorating the cupcakes we had balloon races. Each child raced to the end of the hallway and placed their colored balloon in the clothes hamper. The one with the most balloons in the hamper at the end of 2 minutes won a small prize. In order to distinguish whose balloon belong to whom I placed different stickers (Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Abby Cadabby, and of course Elmo) on each of them. We had a total of 6 children and only 3 different colored balloons.

The most fun game for all was fishing for Dorthy and her friends. I set up a small bucket in the kitchen and the children "fished" using a fishing pool to catch magnetic fish. If it is nice outside you can set up a small pool on your deck and do the same game on a larger scale. It is similar to "pick up the duck" game you see at carnivals. I numbered each fish on the bottom and they were linked to a small prize. Every child won.

Goody Bags
I wanted something a little different and since summer was fast approaching I decided to use small sand pails instead of goody bags. I had three colors; red, blue, and yellow each with sparkles. In each I placed fruit snacks, bubbles, Elmo stickers, an Elmo kite ($1 each at Wal Mart), red play-doh, an Elmo rubber finger puppet, Elmo book ($1 each at Target). I was also able to print out Elmo candy bar wrappers from online. Each wrapper had the Birthday date, balloons, and Elmo's face displayed on it. I wrapped a large size Hershey bar and placed one in each sand pail.