It's been 3 days now and I think I am more or less recovered! Ach, it wasn't that bad, just felt pretty full on - lots of very over-excited kids but then I guess that's to be expected at Halloween.
Everyone looked great in their costumes. I spent most of Friday putting all the decorations up. In the end decided not to go with games which involve dunking face in water/jelly as I thought some of the children might come with faces painted which they did.
For food, Pinterest was my friend so I did ghost bananas, tangerine pumpkins, pumpkin-shaped pizza, hotdogs. And then bought ghost crisps, monster much spider web crisps and did ghost and pumpkin marshmallow kebabs. Bought Halloween cakes from Waitrose. The thing which disappeared first from the food table were M&Ms in pumpkin shaped dishes from M&M World. I put 2 dishes out, went to the kitchen for a minute, came back and they had gone already!
Kids played spot the witch in the garden and danced around to Halloween CD (bought from Amazon). Lucky dip of lollies from carved out pumpkin. Kids could choose glitter body stickers (bought from Accessorize).
They made some Halloween decorations - ceramic pumpkins and card things - bought from Yellow Moon.
Some of the parents stayed after pick-up time for wine which was lovely.
So, all in all, it was good I think - just exhausting. Wasn't helped by late night dash to the shops on Friday night for party bag things. Doesn't seem to matter how organised you think you are, it all gets frantic towards start time.
But the thing which could have potentially put a spanner in the works was DS coming out in chickenpox the morning of the party! I phoned everyone we had invited in the morning to explain and they were all happy to come anyway, most people had had it already and those who hadn't said they wanted their DCs to get it whilst still little. So, we ended up with an unplanned chickenpox party, just hoping now that it doesn't cause problems for anyone!