A Tangled Birthday

We (meaning our entire family) threw a Tangled-theme birthday party for our two-year old niece, Lilee.  She loves this movie!  You can find all kinds of decorations on Pinterest, but in the end, we only decorated with pink and white streamers which were left over from our family's Thanksgiving Eve minute-to-win-it party and a princess mylar balloon. Sadly, our only real decor nod to the movie was in the form of light purple plates and yellow-gold napkins.  Ain't nobody got time the day after Thanksgiving for making paper lanterns, Mucky Duck signs, creepy life-size yellow yarn braids seen here, or cakes made to look like towers.   Instead we wanted to focus on what the kids would do at the party.  Pinterest is always short on those details.  We needed to entertain littles and teenagers, so we had to be creative.  Here is what we came up with:

1) Lilee dressed in a Tangled nightgown so that she was both ready to dance and ready for a quick exit to bed after the party. Target and Kohls have night gowns with Rapunzel on them, but I can't find the cute one Lilee wore.  I'm sure the Disney store has beautiful night gowns as well.

2) We divided the kids into two teams to build castles out of megablocks.  You could also do towers.  Either way would obviously fit the movie.  We used an older version of this.

3) We catapulted marshmallows into the castles, along the lines of catapulting Flynn Rider into the castle.  Teams got points for hitting the castle.  It ended up being a little like the Tangled version of Angry Birds.  I bought the catapults on Amazon, but you can also find it here.

4) We played the Tangled soundtrack and watched Lilee dance.  She loved this.  We could have done nothing else, and she would have been content.  Most people ate dinner while she was dancing.  I considered having our resident blond ballerina, Ainsley, dress as Rapunzel and dance with Lilee.  I couldn't figure out how to get a teenager-sized Rapunzel costume without dropping some serious cash.

5) After dinner, we turned out all the lights and "helped the floating lanterns stay in the air."  Read: keep the glowing balloons from hitting the floor.  We used regular white balloons with yellow glow bracelets in them so that they glowed in the dark.  I used bracelets because they weren't as heavy as a glow stick and they were less expensive.  We (meaning our nephews Tyler and Drew) made fifteen "floating lanterns."

On Pinterest you will see pictures for "pin the frying pan on Flynn Rider."  I don't like that part of the movie, so we did not try hitting anyone with a frying pan.  I did consider doing some velcro darts at a target with Flynn Rider's wanted poster on it, but that would have been too old for Lilee.  Finally, I like the idea of using paint pens on mini canvases from hobby lobby to tie into the art theme.  However, I would never give a two year old a paint pen.

My next party, Zach's 10th (!) bday, will be a Minecraft party.  I am already trying to figure out activities for the party because it will be here before I know it.