An Elmo from another planet

Today is Sofia's birthday! She is having a small party this afternoon and the theme revolves around her favorite Sesame Street character, Elmo. (Who doesn't love Elmo?) Her Dad decided to make an Elmo pinata for her party and he has been working on covering balloons with paper mache all week. Yesterday he called me to help out. He was running out of time and had been called to come to work earlier than planned, so I picked up the parts and brought them home to finish things up. I started by hot gluing all the parts together, then covering them with red tissue paper, applied with diluted white glue.

I think my son-in-law did pretty well at getting the proportions right, just by using balloons. The arms and legs are made using those skinny balloons made to twist into balloon animals. The tissue paper covering had to dry before I could try to make this alien look like lovable little Elmo.

My daughter went to Target yesterday and got goodies to put inside the pinata and picked up ping pong balls and an orange plastic easter egg to use for Elmo's features. I cut his mouth and black circles for his eyes from card stock and glued everything on.

OK, I think he looks kind of like Elmo! Will he pass the Sofia test? That remains to be seen. He has a trap door in the back, from which party favors will fall, when a string is pulled. It seemed best not to go for the traditional blindfolded whacking that is the traditional way to get the goods out of a pinata. A blind-folded two-year-old, armed with a baseball bat just didn't sound right.

I just googled "elmo pinata" and yes, we could have bought one who might have looked a bit more like the real Elmo, but we are amused by our "Elmo from another planet."