Nemo Party 1yr - Inflatable Clown Fish

Invitation:  For my son's 1st birthday, we invited all of his and his sister's playgroup friends.  We have a website that announces events for the group so we did not have to send out printed invitations.  We held his party during the week so that way it would be easier for all of his friends to come.  We had about 15 kids that came from the age of about 6 months to 4 years.

Decorations:  We had our party at one of our local parks.  We decorated one of the pavilions in Nemo streamers and balloons that we were lucky to find in clearance at the party store.  We also had a 3-foot orange inflatable clownfish (ebay) that looked just like Nemo that we used as a table decoration (when the kids weren't playing with it).  We also had seahorse inflatables and blue tablecloths that we got from our dollar store.  I wanted a Nemo scene setter, but since I couldn't find one, I just made my own.  I took pictures from my daughter large Nemo coloring book and cut out different characters.  I also made some of my own with construction paper.  I made a shark that looked a little friendlier than the one in the movie since these were little kids.  We glued all this to a blue tablecloth and hung it up with clothespins.  Everyone thought it was cute.

Activities:  We originally planned on having the party at this park because it has a large water play area that the kids really enjoy.  Wouldn't you know that when we got there that morning, there were men working on it?  Well, they never fixed it in time for the party, but no one seemed to mind because the park also has a large playground.  So the kids played on that for a while.  Then we did a Nemo piñata that I got from a party store that I converted to a pull-string kind. In the piñata, we had Nemo toys that came from a clearance aisle party pack from the party store with slinkies, stickers, prisms, etc.  We also had a ton of Hershey kisses with stickers on the bottom that you can get off ebay.  They have four different Nemo characters and they were personalized with my son's name and happy 1st birthday."  We also put several bags of dum-dums in there so the kids were over the moon with those.    After the piñata we sang happy birthday to my son and while he made a mess of his cake all the other kids enjoyed their cupcakes.

Party Snacks:  In large sand buckets we had individual packs of goldfish crackers and finding Nemo fruit snacks.  We had coolers of Capri suns for the kids and soda and water for the adults.

Cake:  I was proud of the cake I made for my son.  It was my first try at decorating a cake.  I traced Nemo on wax paper from a coloring page and transferred onto the cake.  I made seaweed on the top and sides with icing and I wrote his name to look like seaweed as well.  For the cupcakes I just put blue icing on top and then stuck a water-squirter in it with different ocean characters (ebay and target).

Favors: Since the kids were all so young I wanted to do favor’s that they could actually use since most favor bags contain choking hazards. As luck would have it my local dollar store came in with Nemo toys right before his party. Each kid got a Nemo beach ball and even though they had small Nemo sand buckets I opted to get larger ones and just put a large Nemo sticker on it.  These were supposed to be for the water play but the kids just enjoyed running around with the balls and filling the buckets with sand.  The buckets also held their piñata goodies.  So it worked out well.   Everyone had a great time and now I got to get started planning my daughter's upcoming birthday!"