With Finding Dory being a movie  we’ve all excitedly hoped for for 13 years, it only makes sense that it should be kicked off with an all-day celebration! Being a major Pixar fan and a lover of themed days, I just had to create a full day of fun to celebrate the June 17th premiere of Finding Dory. Essentially, my family and I had an all day party!

I’m excited to share with all of you our awesome, yet intimate family Finding Dory party. You can either replicate our celebration, or just use my ideas to help inspire your own fun-filled day packed with activities, or even to help execute a Finding Nemo or Dory birthday party!

The Morning

1. Finding Nemo Screening

Begin with the movie that started it all! Not only is having breaky and wearing pajamas while watching a movie as a family a great way to start the day, but also because sequels always seem to have lots of little references to the first movie. Just like Nemo has to “brush” every day, we started off by brushing up on our Finding Nemo.

2. A Nemo-striped Breakfast

Good movies require good food! I whipped up some Nemo-Striped oatmeal! It’s a pumpkin and chocolate oatmeal recipe, made with all natural clean-eating ingredients. And is even 21 Day Fix approved if you follow that program. You can check out my recipe here.

The Afternoon

1. Water Play Time!

What better Dory activity than some water play time? I don’t have access to a pool, but in our small back yard this Finding Dory water table by Step 2 works perfectly. This water table has been a huge hit with my 16-month-old daughter, and her 3-year-old playmate! When she uses it she has endless giggles, I think even more so than in the pool. She makes huge splashes, loves her Hank, Dory, and Nemo water squirters, but doesn’t get the cold shivers like she gets in the pool (being such a youngling). It is also helping teach her some fine motor skills from turning the wheel in the center of the water table to make huge waves.

This has been a great purchase that is perfect for whether my daughter wants to have water play on a 90 degree or 70 degree day, since she gets wet but not drenched. We even found this beyond cute Nemo bathing suit at The Disney Store for $9.99 during their Twice Upon A Year Sale.

There’s tons of water activities one can do that are simple–playing with a hose or sprinklers in swim suits, or playing games in the bath tub. Water plus kids equal the perfect mix.

You can check out the rest of our water play time gallery below:

2. Healthy, Kid-Approved Snacks

It’s no secret kids love snacks that look appealing, and has been a long-known trick-of-the trade to get kids to eat healthfully. I made a snack plate that has the bright, bold summer colors of Dory and Nemo: Greek Yogurt (I used Chobani plain greek) with blueberries, and a drizzle of honey. On the side, a serving of baby carrots (for my daughter, she had a Comforts Baby carrot & apple food pouch since she can’t chew carrots yet).

Tip: Greek yogurt is a taste that many kids and even some adults need to adapt to, I recommend to mash your berries with the back of your spoon, then mix it with the yogurt and honey to make it taste like a fruit yogurt, without the artificial fruit flavorings!

The Evening

1. Dinner and Conversation

Although my family and I will sometimes LOVE to eat dinner while watching a movie, I like to make sure we maintain a balance of screen time and personal time. I find it very important for us to also have meals where we sit and simply make good conversation with each other. Although my daughter is too young to participate, having some days where she sits at the table with her food and listens to us talk is beginning to set a good precedent for her at a young age. Since we are planning on seeing Finding Dory at the end of our meal, I decided this would be a great conversation dinner time day!

My husband and I are big movie buffs, so we like to reflect upon our thoughts and expectations before and after seeing a movie. Today, we discussed what characters we’re excited to see or get to know for the first time in Finding Dory, and we’re having fun speculating and guessing what some of the revelations might be about Dory’s past.

With our fun backyard dinner conversation, we made a themed meal on the BBQ: Fish Are Friends, Not Food Tacos!

I am a vegetarian, but my husband isn’t. For this special themed meal though, we both ate vegetarian with Gardein Fishless strips. He absolutely loves them, and said he could have been fooled into thinking they were real! Plus, the Gardein Fishless strips are frozen, so you don’t have to worry about them going bad as quickly as real fish.

This was a delicious and simple meal, we just had some small corn tortillas, cooked up our fish till it was slightly charred (just how I like it), and topped it with shredded red cabbage, diced salsa, and clean-eating guacamole. The perfect Baja meal, and a nod to Finding Dory‘s setting of the California Coastline.

2. Finding Dory

Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Going to see Finding Dory! I won’t post any spoilers here, but let’s just say we had an AMAZING time, and the film was worth the day-long celebration.

3. A Bedtime Story

With our little hyped up and excited from our movie-going experience, we needed some wind-down time with a bedtime story. There are TONS of Finding Nemo and Finding Dory themed books around to choose from. Since our little likes books, but is at the stage where she has a short attention span, we picked up a couple short board books from the Target Dollar Spot.

She loves the big pictures and stares at them for a long time, and loved pointing at everything. Target Dollar Spot books are the best find for a toddler bedtime story!