Family Movie Night: Brave

With Audrey starting kindergarten next week, I've been thinking more about scheduling intentional family time.  Up to this point, we spend so much time together every day that I have never really thought about being intentional about it.  However, with her starting school and our schedule getting busier, we want to be more purposeful to make sure that our whole family spends regular time together.  For this year, we are going to go with Friday Family Nights, and try our best to make Friday nights a night when our whole family does an activity together.

To kick it off, we had a Family Movie Night last night.  I've seen a lot of people in the online Disney community throw fun Disney themed movie nights, and I've always thought it would be fun to do one with our family.  We decided to go with the movie Brave for this one.

I printed out movie tickets from this site, and told the girls that they had to have their ticket to get into our movie night.  They were so excited to hold onto their tickets all afternoon and then give them to me when it was time for the night to start.

If you know me, then you know I like to go all out with party decorations.  It would have been fun to go all out for this movie night, but I didn't decided to do it until just a few hours before we started.  Plus, we really don't have the extra money to splurge on fun stuff like themed movie nights (because we are in the process of giving Disney World ALL of our money for our upcoming vacation!!).  So this was thrown together with store bought food and random stuff I found around the house.  Nothing too fancy!

Our menu was pretty simple, but I tried to tie it into the movie to make it a little more special.

I bought a few of these princess digital clip art sets a while back to make an autograph book for Audrey at Disney World.  So I used the Merida princesses from those sets to make the menu and placecards.

This plaid blanket was the only thing in my house that I could find that looked like it would kind of fit with the Brave theme, so I threw it on the table.  I served the "witches brew" (which was just berry blend juice) in wine glasses to represent medieval goblets.  Though we ended up giving Isla a smaller cup with a straw so she didn't spill her juice or break the glass or both!  The girls did think it was really fun to have such fancy cups on the table!

I made plain old pasta and marinara sauce, using rotini noodles to represent Merida's curly red hair.  (Except my girls don't like marinara sauce, so I made a bowl of plain white noodles for them!)

In the movie, Merida gives her mom a little pastry/cake that has a spell in it which causes her to turn into a bear.  So I served the girls "spell cakes" (store bought iced cookies because I didn't have time to make anything.  I wanted to try these Scottish Sweet Buns, but it didn't happen) with the warning to eat at their own risk!

After dinner, we played this Coin Archery game, where the girls tossed coins and tried to land on the target.  They thought it was SO much fun.  It was fun to watch them play and laugh together.

Then it was time to watch the movie.  I had some coloring pages for them to work on while they watched it.  They intently watched the first 45 minutes of the movie or so, but then they just wanted to get up and play.

For a movie snack, we had Bear Popcorn Mix (since bears are central to the plot of the movie), which was popcorn, gummy bears and chocolate Teddy Grahams.

It was a really fun night for the whole family!  While it looks like a lot when I type it all out like this, it really didn't take much effort at all to pull everything together.  The girls thought it was just great.  I think we will definitely be doing another themed movie night again with a different movie!