Halloween Party Playdate Featuring Kmart Halloween & Party Bluprints

We’ve been hav­ing SO much fun with Hal­loween this year! In keep­ing with our themed play­dates (last month’s was “Dinosaur Day”), we decided to do a Hal­loween day for Octo­ber. I was so excited to host and actu­ally dec­o­rate for Hal­loween this year. Before hav­ing kids, I used to dec­o­rate for Hal­loween quite a bit. In fact, I even use to dec­o­rate my dorm room & had “Mad Sci­en­tist” Day when I taught jr. high. Since hav­ing kids we’ve had fun with family-themed cos­tumes, but just haven’t really done much to the house in recent years. So, with Big Brother now 4 & 1/2 and SO much more aware of every­thing, I was so excited to dec­o­rate this year! We pulled out our Hal­loween dec­o­ra­tion bins and got some new things too!

The Party Bluprints Blog has a lot of “totally ghoul” Hal­loween ideas and they got their awe­some dec­o­ra­tions at Kmart!! I have to admit that I nor­mally would not have thought about going to Kmart for Hal­loween decor; how­ever, I was really impressed with their selec­tion (and their prices)!

Lit­tle Brother and I had LOTS of fun shopping–I think we spent over an hour check­ing every­thing out! (You can see the huge selec­tion from our shop­ping trip here). Once we got every­thing home, then the fun dec­o­rat­ing began.

The Decor

Between the items I already had and then see­ing the fun spi­der things on Party Bluprints, I decided to go with a spider-ish theme in our dining/living room. It’s def­i­nitely creepy & Hal­loween feel­ing with­out being too scary or gross for the kids.

This room fea­tures a few of my favorite new pur­chases: The giant pos­able spi­der, the large spi­der webs (such a great deal at $2.99), and the spi­der web cake plate! We hung the large black webs on each wall and then attached the white, pull-apart web­bing all over–from the chan­de­lier, to the china hutch, the chairs, the table–everything. There is a black spi­der web table run­ner on the table (that I already had, but Kmart had some great spi­der web table­cloth options), the spi­der web cake plate, can­dles, and a caul­dron with candy. The large spi­der is crawl­ing down from the china hutch and we draped the flow­ers (it’s one of two altar arrange­ments from our wed­ding) in black gauze-like fab­ric. I wrapped the table in some black bat gar­land and then of course, put all kinds of various-sized spi­ders around.

We also put some dec­o­ra­tions out front and in our fam­ily room. With a play­date for the kid­dos, I didn’t want any­thing gory or scary, so we just went with a few fes­tive things by the door. I love the plas­tic light cov­ers for less than $2 each!

In the fam­ily room, we went a lit­tle more cutesy, com­bin­ing some old dec­o­ra­tions with some super fun new light-up pump­kins and ghosts pur­chased from Kmart! We also set out a bunch of Hal­loween books–perfect for decor and the play­date!

The Spread

While I love dec­o­rat­ing the house, I really love mak­ing some fun, cre­ative foods! Here’s our Hal­loween play­date food spread:

For drinks, we had “bub­bling swamp slime”. So tasty!  “Mon­ster mouths” made with apples were our healthy morn­ing snack!  These are SO fun! Just red apples with peanuts for teeth! The kids got a HUGE kick out of them! I LOVED the idea of eng­lish muf­fin piz­zas and “bone sticks” from Party Bluprints! I couldn’t find refrig­er­ated bread­sticks though, so I just cut pizza dough and shaped it like bones.

Serve those up with some “blood” dip (mari­nara sauce) and Jack ‘O Lantern Piz­zas. The kids had fun mak­ing these. We lightly toasted the eng­lish muffins first, put a lit­tle red sauce on, cov­ered with cheese (a com­bi­na­tion of moz­zarella & ched­dar to make them a lit­tle more pumpkin-like), then let the kids dec­o­rate their jack ‘o lantern piz­zas with pep­per­o­nis & black olives cut in var­i­ous shapes.

Lunch was a hit, but the kids espe­cially loved the sweet treats (no big sur­prise there!) The spi­der web snacks & Hal­loween oreo pops were def­i­nitely the two crowd-pleasers!

The Activ­i­ties

No play­date would be com­plete with­out fun activ­i­ties. There was a lot of “free play”, but also some Hal­loween sto­ries, slime mak­ing, and pump­kin paint­ing. We had plans to make the cute hand­print spi­der webs too, but just ran out of time. So, we’re plan­ning that as an upcom­ing activ­ity!

To get ready for your own Hal­loween party (or play­date), make sure you check out Party Bluprints and Kmart! Specif­i­cally, be sure to check out the weekly “Mon­ster deals” at Kmart! And, you can also enter to win a Hal­loween “Mon­ster Bash” by lik­ing Kmart on face­book. The prize amount increases each week!

What Hal­loween fun are YOU planning?

Linked to: *Tip Junkie

Dis­clo­sure: This shop has been com­pen­sated as part of a social shop­per insights study for Col­lec­tive Bias. #cbias #KmartHal­loween. As always, all opin­ions and expe­ri­ences are my own.