This weekend we celebrated my son’s fourth birthday with a couple of his friends from our playgroup. A couple months ago I stumbled upon the idea of having a Mickey Mouse Pajama Party. It was inspired by an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (Minnie’s Pajama Party) that was on a DVD we reviewed awhile back here) and the Celebration Center on the Playhouse Disney website.

I had a couple goals for this party – I wanted to keep it small but make it special – I really wanted to keep our budget in check as much as possible but I wanted it to be a party he’d remember. Since we were only inviting two families, I had the luxury of being able to do a lot of things by hand – something I wouldn’t have attempted if we’d been inviting more people. So there’s one good thing about living so far from our friends and family back in New England…

So the first step was sending out invitations which I blogged about here. My husband used an image editing tool to create a stencil of Mickey Mouse’s head so that I could make my invitations (and so they’d be the right size to fit inside the envelopes I bought). Then I folded the largest circle in half so that it would resemble a classic Mickey Mouse Hat – and thus the “card” was formed. Some cute half-quotes from the tv show and party information was added with a gel pen and voila! This idea was not my own either btw – another idea that was inspired from someone far smarter than me. 😛

The day of the party, I gathered the small mountain of supplies that I’d acquired over the last month and put together the goodie bags you saw in the first picture. I called this bag the Mouseketools (if you follow the tv show, you know what that means) – inside are all the “tools they need” to enjoy the party. Silverware for their cupcakes – silly straws for their chocolate milk. Crayons for the coloring books underneath the bags – I got the coloring books at the Dollar Store – a fantastic find as they are really nice coloring books for the price! And also some little horns aka noise makers and Bubble Rings – for general fun-having. Cheesy, yes, but they seemed to get a kick out of it.

As an an aside, one of the Curious George stories that we just love (MM’s favorite in fact) is about The Man in the Yellow Hat throwing Curious George a surprise party. There is a page that describes George wandering into the living room where he finds, “hats, games and noisemakers… and streamers, balloons and colored tissue – Could this be part of his friend’s surprise??” And because George could not resist, he immediately takes all of these supplies to decorate the living room… Anyway, we decided to recreate that scene a bit the morning of the party – we made sure to have noisemakers in the goodie bags – and we decorated with streamers and balloons – there was colored tissue in the present we got him (which was in fact a game) … and well there would have been party hats printed off Disney’s website if my printer had cooperated.

So that was the basic set up of the party. The guests arrived at 10:00am and we had muffins, bagels, donut holes and fresh fruit and juice to nibble on while the kids played, colored, etc. I tried to give them plenty of unorganized time to just have fun in MM’s room and be kids. After awhile I drew them back to the table for cupcakes which I had the fabulous idea to let them decorate themselves. I frosted them with some whipped chocolate frosting (whipped frosting is so easy to spread!) and then let them go nuts a little with the many, many jars of sprinkles that I’ve accumulated over the years – with a tiny bit of supervision. As you’d expect – this got pretty crazy, but since we knew it was going to be, it wasn’t really a big deal at all – and it was a lot of fun.

Don’t the kids look adorable in their jammies?

I’d bought ice cream, too, but being so early in the morning I opted to skip it and they didn’t seem to mind. I’m guessing the parents were grateful – haha

How cute are those silly straws? And you know, my kid’s pretty cute, too.

Next (after a lot of cleaning up! Hurray for wet wipes!) we opened presents…

As you can see, fun was had by all – it really went perfectly I think. I have this theory that you can tell a lot about a family and the parents by the birthday parties we threw – and I think this party summed us up pretty perfectly – fun, a little messy and sometimes uncoordinated. Relaxed but cheesy and silly. In our pajamas. 🙂