Jen Desmarais

When your child gives you just over two weeks to plan a birthday party, and decides to make the theme that of the hit movie of the summer (the one that Netflix has yet to put out any merch for), you don’t panic.

You plan.

I hope that this helps you if you find yourself in a similar situation, whether by using the templates or getting inspiration.

This party had four parts: craft, dance, food, free play. (Note that we were in a park.)

All links are affiliate-free. Canva links contain all free items. The image background for the badges is from NASA.

Initial setup

Invitations and Thank you card templates on Canva (both French and English are included)

Badges (lanyard from chasingartwork, ID card holders from Amazon, badge – front and back template on Canva)

Please note that if you need any assistance with the Canva templates, you can contact me through our contact us form!

Craft

Needed:

• mirrored compact, plastic (Amazon)
• emery board (Amazon)
• stencil (or you can free-hand it) (Canva template)
• nail polish (whatever brand you like)
• spray sealant (Walmart)

Optional:

• nail polish remover and q-tips/paper towels
• Exacto knife (if you’re cutting out a stencil like I did) and cutting board – do this in advance! It’ll take longer than you think.

Steps:

1. Rough up the surface of the plastic with the emery board, just a little bit. This allows the paint to adhere better to the plastic.
2. Tape the stencil in place so it doesn’t move around.
3. Use very little nail polish to paint your design. Too much will leak underneath the stencil. Experiment! Different polishes will give you a different result.
4. Remove the stencil immediately so that it doesn’t stick to the nail polish.
5. Let it dry for a few minutes.
6. Spray with the sealant. (outdoors)
   • Note: Don’t touch the sealant until it’s completely dry!

Dance

We had my sister to teach “Soda Pop” to the kids. If you don’t happen to have a trained dance teacher on hand, here’s a tutorial so that you can teach it. I might recommend “Golden” instead – it’s a little slower.

Food

We had popcorn from Papa Jack’s Surprise Box (like Zoey and Mira cry after seeing Abby’s abs) and juice boxes (generic) to snack on.

We made cupcakes, added blue food colouring to the icing, to look like the top of Derpy (the tiger)’s head. Then we printed out tiny images of Sussy the bird and taped them to toothpicks (you can search for these. I didn’t do anything special to them).

Free Play

Note that it is a good time to get everyone together for a picture before you release them to play.

We gave out gymnastic ribbon wands (Amazon) (to represent the honmoon) and played the soundtrack. They danced around waving the ribbons, and it looked super cool! Sorry I can’t share the picture – too many kids’ faces. Believe me when I say that it looked amazing.

Loot bags

We had to get creative with these as well, since there’s no merch yet!

Obviously, they got to bring home their painted mirrors and the ribbons. We taped up the popcorn bags if they didn’t eat it all, and put them in the bags too.

• Bags (Amazon)
• Stickers (we bought ours from gilove2draw)
• Glow sticks (Amazon)
• Ramen snack pack (Real Canadian Superstore)
• Rockets (generic)
• I added 3 extra emery boards to the bags because we had extras after the craft

We considered adding mini microphones, but I didn’t like any of the ones I found.

We also considered doing facepaint as an activity, but decided against it.

I hope you enjoyed this post and found something useful to help you in your party planning! Feel free to reach out with any questions!