these are precious days...: August 2014

Silas loves trains, cars, planes, anything that goes, so we went with a Thomas theme to celebrate him turning the big 2!!!

For Silas' birthday I made him chocolate pudding/marshmallow creme/graham cracker and oreo parfaits. I got the plastic champagne cups from Dollar Tree, then filled the bottom with graham cracker crumbs, then a layer of red sprinkles, then alternated a few more layers of graham cracker crumbs/spinkles until we reached the wide portion. Then I put in a layer of marshmallow creme then chocolate pudding then sprinkled crumbled up Oreos on the top. He loved them. To the bottom I taped a different Thomas card we had from a deck of cards.

He had a party with our play date group friends at a splash park, he loved it!

My daughter was, (gulp where does the time go?), turning 5 and for her birthday she wanted a beach party and the theme...Princess! Mommy was SO excited, she loves having a theme for gatherings, and with this one the opportunities are endless!

Now we are landlocked so the closest we can get to a beach is a reservoir. Thankfully we have a state parks pass and a favorite local state park beach we like to attend so we decided to throw the party there. SO glad she ultimately chose a beach party, this was really nice: no rental fee for the venue, no limits on guests, no height restrictions, etc. We just had to buy a canopy and some fold up tables, which we were wanting to get anyway so it was a good excuse to finally bite the bullet.

Food: I like to pair foods with the theme, so here's what we served:

Tiana's Savoury Cheese Puffs! Lady L loves these so they have be served at her party!

Merida's Bow and Arrows: This was a selection of pretzels, the typical loopy kind and sticks
and the containers were from Dollar Tree. We used stickers to decorate the notecards, for the characters (like Merida) where I didn't have her on a store bought sheet, we utilized the free stickers Disney sends to get you to join their movie club.

Snow White's Fruit Snacks: My girl loves fruit snacks and they had these princess ones at Target so I decided to display them
in this Princess dresser which we swiped from her dollhouse.

Belle's Bon Bon Cookies! Found the recipe for these from a book called Fairies Cookbook by Barbara Beery, the author called them Magic Bonbon Cookies. I altered the name to be Belle's because the word "bonbon" is french and so is Belle! They were delicious and a big hit at the party.

Princess Popcorn: I got this idea from Katie Covar's Pinterest page. The Wilton spray was easy and the color was so vibrant and I loved that it didn't change the taste or texture of the popcorn.

Got the idea for Little Mermaid's Singing Shells also from the Fairies Cookbook but
I was able to find the Madeleine shells at Costco and then just dipped them in melting chocolates and sprinkles.
These were also a hit, the ones with the pearl sprinkles were the best (imho)

Bibbity "Kabob"itty Boo: I felt pretty clever coming up with that name, I must say!
These were so fun to make, my husband and I had fun doing different patterns with the fruit and it
gave us an excuse to get that melon baller we always dreamed about. ha ha!

We also brought take out pizza from Little Caesars and had mini water bottles with a collection of those mini lemonade and fruit punch packets to turn water into juice.

Now onto decorations!

For our long car trip last year I had purchased my lady L a magnetic princess dress up set and when she decided to have this princess themed party I swept through our place looking for anything princess related to use at the party and came across these. So we just set them up, little lady picked the outfits each princess would wear and they were an easy (and thankfully small) table decoration. You can see Belle next to the dresser and Rapunzel on the right behind the Bibbity "Kabob"itty Boos.

Last year I found these "decorate your own" plastic cups (pictured above) at Shmalshmart and we used them for her Strawberry Shortcake party. This year I just cut new paper and let the birthday girl go to town with princess stickers and princess stamps.

We rounded up all her Princess dolls and wrapped Dad's fishing wire each one's waist and hung them under the canopy. Easy decoration and the kids all had fun going around and seeing the dolls. We tied Elsa and Anna back to back since they're sisters and tied Belle and the Beast face to face so they were hugging. All the dolls except one were Disney characters, she put a crown on one of her Barbies and called her "Princess Berry." She made a point to introduce "Princess Berry" to some of her guests, that was pretty cute and she was pretty proud she had invented a princess.

Activities:

The beautiful thing about having a party at the beach is that the activities are already built in! Guests brought their floats and we brought extra shovels and buckets for the kids to play with (we labeled all our items with permanent marker in case there were any disputes or munchkin thieves not part of the party)