Monsters Inc Baby Shower

Last week I had the fun chance to throw a baby shower for my good friend Emily who is due in a few weeks with her first baby! She's so cute.  I love her. =)  She is decorating her baby boy's room in a monster theme, so I decided to go with that theme and we had a monster/monsters inc shower.   I have to say that it was soo much fun to plan, design, and put together.  

I, of course, being crazy and scatter brained forgot on the day-of to bring my camera to take pictures, so a BIG thank you goes out to my sweet friend Carrie (from thirtyfiveninetyfive) for the pictures she snapped for me!  For my baby shower that my awesome SIL's threw for me last year, we had breakfast food served, and since Emily's shower was going to be in the morning, we pretty much used all the same recipes again!

Don't you love the monster cupcake/muffin stand?!  It turned out so much cuter than I had hoped!  The teeth and eyeballs are just made of cardstock and glued to the edges.  The stand itself is three square boards wrapped in lime wrapping paper on a glass cake stand with glass jars in between filled with blue sizzle paper.  I used green eyelash yarn to finish it off.

These two muffin recipes are awesome!  We followed my SIL's instructions here:

Glazed Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

Glazed Donut Muffins

My Silhouette machine made a lot of these decorations so easy.  I designed these little Mike and Sully silhouettes that I cut out of different colored/patterned papers.  I also found a free font that looks like the one from Monster's Inc.  

You can download Monster AG Font HERE

I also used my machine to cut out the letters for Oliver's name above the table and more silhouettes and circles to make a garland around the sides.

For this cinnamon roll cake we used the adapted recipe from

HERE

This french toast casserole recipe is a Pioneer Woman recipe and the directions I followed were from

HERE

This casserole is a family recipe of mine, and a favorite! 

 I will be sharing this recipe next week so make sure to check on Tuesday! =)

These were the invitations I made.  Walmart makes amazing prints... cough... so of course they printed up looking exactly like this... NOT.  They were still ok but just not what I was expecting.  (Haha I can say that calmly now, but at the time it was the end of the world. ;))

Well I hope that you liked some of the ideas that I had and that it maybe gave you some ideas if you are planning a Monsters Inc. shower or party for someone you know!

Cupid Wings Tutorial

Happy beginning to February!  I am so excited about this tutorial!  I had an idea a while back to give Ammon's grandmas a valentine picture of him with him all dressed up as a cupid.  So naturally to get inspiration, I went to Pinterest knowing that I could not have been the first person to think of this.  Someone else out there had to have already dressed up their baby and taken pictures to show all their kid's friends and future spouse one day. ;)  And I did find a few things, but I ended up just making up my own.  And I think that they turned out pretty dang cute!  (or that could just be him =))  I thought that they were super easy to make, and they were extremely cheap to make too! 
TOTAL COST: $2

Ooooo!!!  I want to eat him! =)

Reindeer Hunt

When I was little, my dad used to do the cutest things to make Christmas morning more special for us.  We always left out the milk and cookies for Santa, and we always left out some carrots for the reindeer too.  And in the morning, the cookies and carrots weren't JUST gone.  My dad would do things like crumble up some of the cookies and spell out, "THANKS" with the crumbs, or carve a snowman out of the carrots.  One year he even made a video of the carrot being sucked through the blinds.  He always made it so fun.

 

I want to do fun things for my kids to make Christmas morning as fun and magical for them as it was for me and my brothers.  However, Ammon, is only 6 months old, so he doesn't really understand the whole missing cookies thing.  So, this year I decided to do something special for my nephews last night instead.  They are at the perfect age right now for something like this!

 

I made a fluorescent "paint" and a reindeer track stamp out of felt hot glued to the bottom of a super old shoe I was going to throw away, and I put tracks leading them down the sidewalk and around the front of Grandma's house.  It was dark out so I borrowed a blacklight flashlight that Grandpa uses to hunt for scorpions and made a label for it turning it into a "Flying Reindeer Hunting Light".  I got several carrots, and tied them up with a ribbon.  I also wrote a little poem and turned it into a cute printable note and tag.

To download PDF copy of printable, click here

 

Haha... the label was more as a joke.  There are a lot of people in my family that like Duck Dynasty.  So I made it a DEER Dynasty light, and put a Santa face on it.  Only looking at it... I think it's pretty easy to just mistake the Santa face as one of the people on the actual show! '=)

 

So once all that was in place, I sent them on a reindeer hunt!  I told them the North Pole called me that day, and told me that at a certain time, someone would be stopping by, then told them it was time and sent them into the front yard.

 

(I did colorize the footprints when editing these pictures so you could see how I did them)

The boys had a lot of fun following tracks to the surprise from Rudolph at the end with the carrots to leave out.  The was super easy, and fast, and I think that they enjoyed it.  AAANDDD... it was super CHEAP.

    M&M candy canes ($1/each)
+  Carrots (50 cents for 5)
+  Highlighter ($1)

TOTAL COST: $2.50!!!

How to put it together:

Reindeer stamp:
The printable has a template for the reindeer hoof.  I printed this, traced it on to some felt, cut it out, and glued it to the bottom of an old shoe I was going to throw away.  I was originally going to glue it to the bottom of a can, but all the cans I had were really small, and my shoe was the first alternative I thought of.  Haha, I'm sure you can find something better!  But I just dipped the felt in the paint and stamped out the hoof print.  Easy peasy.

Reindeer Footprint Glow Paint

Fluorescent highlighter (yellow or green work best)
1/4 cup water
1 Tbs liquid dish soap
1 Tbs cornstarch

Here is a tutorial how I got the idea for my reindeer footprint paint using a highlighter.  (link shows how they open the end of the highlighter and pull out the inside felt)  It's super easy.  I just let the highlighter felt soak in the water, then added some green liquid dish soap I had on hand (which kinda glowed under the blacklight too), and then the cornstarch. It was still very liquidy, but a little bit goes a long way!  It may not look like much on the sidewalk, but under the blacklight it glows really good! It dries super light colored, and in the dark you can't tell it's there.  And it just washes off after.

Here is a tutorial for just plain ol' washable sidewalk paint if you don't want to cut open a highlighter, or don't have a flashlight blacklight.

I hope you enjoy!