7 Cute Ways to Throw a Monsters Inc. Party for Your Kid ...

Well, the first thing I do when throwing any party is choose a color scheme, and that's exactly what I did for the Monsters, Inc. party. I went with the light blue and green, since those are the colors of the two main monsters, Mike and Sulley. I used these colors for the tablecloths, napkins, paper products and balloons. The colors not only worked well for the theme, but they looked great together.

If you haven't seen the movie before, the monsters access kids' bedrooms through doors and there is an entire factory of doors. I used these doors as the source of my inspiration for the birthday banner. I used different colored card stock and decorated each one to look like a different door. In the center of each door, I wrote a letter for "Happy 3rd Birthday." I strung up a piece of ribbon across the ceiling and hung the doors from the ribbon with a clothespin. The banner looked just like the credits in the movie. It was perfect!

I made decorative garland for the party using images of the characters that I printed out on the Internet. I just cut out the characters and hung them on lengths of ribbon, which I hung from our mantel and above the windows.

Mike, one of the main characters, only has one eye. I put a twist on the classic game of pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey and made a pin-the-eye-on-Mike. I just drew a big green circle on a piece of poster board and hung it on the wall. I drew and cut out eyes on pieces of card stock. Each child was blindfolded and had to try to pin the eye as close to the center of "Mike" as possible. It was a real hoot!

Another game that I made was feed the monster. You know the old bean-bag toss games? Well, this is the same idea, but the kids were tossing bean bags into the mouth of a monster. My husband crafted a game board out of wood and cut a hole in the center of it. I painted the board to look like a monster. We set the game up on the lawn and the kids took turns tossing bean bags into the monster's mouth and "feeding" him.

I also served up some Monster's Inc-inspired food. I served chicken fingers and called them "monster feet." I made up a big batch of Monster's Inc-shaped mac-and-cheese. I also made a big Mike eye out of grapes. For this, I covered a circular platter with green grapes. In the center of the grapes, I placed a small circular dish filled with vanilla yogurt and in the middle of the yogurt, I put some blueberries for Mike's eye.

Instead of a cake, my son asked for cupcakes, which were super easy to make. I just made a batch of vanilla and a batch of chocolate cupcakes. I dyed vanilla icing both green and blue and covered the chocolate cupcakes with blue icing and the vanilla with green icing. I then used gel icing in different colors to add some monster features to the cupcakes.

Not only did my son and all of his friends have a blast at his Monsters, Inc. party, but so did the adults. It was way too cute! Do you have any ideas to add?