4th Birthday Fairy Enchantment

For Riley's 4th Birthday, she was quite decided that she was having a fairy birthday party. I was thrilled because I had always wanted to do a fairy party!

Invites
I lucked out at a warehouse sale and found some leaf printed paper invites for super cheap, I think they were 50 for $4! I then printed out in super small fairy sized writing the invitation wording, rolled them up, tied with a bit of tulle & attached a magnifying glass in case the fairy's writing was just too small.

Venue, Decorations & Favors
This time around, this party was done in our house, let's just say it was nice and cozy, which was perfect for an enchanted fairy kingdom. There was a lot of tulle and logs & moss, I wanted a good mix of  fluffy, sparkly things and the natural world. I scavanged borrowed many items from family to use. My aunt has a collection of fairy figurines and had tons of left over tulle from doing her renewal of vows the year before, my good friend had cut down a tree and had tons of logs & small branches. I happened upon perfect purple and lime green sparkly branches & flowers and cute little sparkly butterflies at Michael's after Christmas sale for 70% off!

With the tulle, my niece and I draped it from one end of the room along the ceiling to the other, letting it hang down on each side, trying to make it feel "enchanted" and in a fairy cove. The logs were turned into various elements, from a flower tree to stands for the food.

Never did get a great picture of the tulle hanging, this was at the end of the day as it was starting to fall down.

 

 

I was able to make the Happy Birthday banner from the same paper I made the invitations on, costing me absolutely nothing!

I included favors here, as I used the favors as part of the decorations. I had the coffee table set up with the fairy houses they were to decorate. I originally thought of them gluing on moss, sticks and rocks then thought...um they're 3 &  4 years old, lets make this easy.
I made tutus for the girls. I also wanted to get them fairy wings. Everywhere I checked, online & in stores, were very expensive. I knew that the Dollar Tree had them previously, but couldn't find them now. I went to their website & they had them....in lots of 36 wings. Yeah, definitely didn't need 36 wings. However, when I priced them against purchasing the exact amount I needed, it was about the same. I decided to get them from the Dollar Tree, use extras as decorations then donate the remaining to R's preschool. Worked out great. To top it off, literally, I made simple fairy halo's made from wired garland & curling ribbons and to help with their fairy & gnome magic, we dressed up wands with curling ribbon & jingle bells. For the few boys that were coming, while they were welcomed to dress as fairies if they wanted to, we did have Elf hats (cone party hats spray painted green) and Elf beards that I made from a piece of felt to hook around their ears.
They were also able to pick out & take home one of the flower fairies we made & had used as decoration also.

Fairy house pre decoration along with the fairy wands.

Flower fairies in production

Flower Fairies as decoration

And Flower Fairy as favor

Food
Just as I was able to use the invitation to make the birthday banner, I was also able to use it to make the food lables on the table. We had a wonderful sampling of woodland delights! For the cake, my sister found these adorable cupcake liners & picks, but I ran out of steam in making the cupcakes and sent Mr. to the store to buy some cupcakes. Not wanting the liners to go to waste, I slipped each store bought cupcake into the line & put the picks in them. I did completely fess up to all that they were from a store!

The food table

A close up showing how we used branches, logs river rocks & the fairy figurines

Butterfly sandwiches - PB&J and Chicken Salad

Toadstools - string cheese & tomato halves
*the "plate" was a slate candle holder I had!

Fairy Wands. We drilled holes into the branch to hold the skewers

Twigs & Berries

The Veggie Patch and the Fishing Pond

 
Activities
Since the guests were all 3 & 4 years old, I decided to keep the organized activities to a minimum and just allow time to play.  They got to decorate their fairy houses and my older daughter M read them one of R's favorite books, Camilla the Cupcake Fairy. Meanwhile, my niece painted fairy faces on the children.

Madison reading to the fairies

At the end of the party, I had a happy and very tired birthday girl.

Links to items used or ideas:
Flower Tree, though I ended up cutting my stems too short, was supposed to be like this one
Flower Fairies, possibly my favorite craft for this party, this will tell you how to make them
This blog gave me the inspiration for the rolled invitation.
This blog, karaspartyideas.com gave me the inspiration for the natural aspects of the party, along with the Fairy Wand fruit kabobs
Thank you for stopping by!

Why Hello there...

Missed me? I know, it's been like what...2 years? So, I really kind of suck at this whole blogging thing.

Anyhow, I decided I'm going to try & do this blog thing better and I'm going to start off with some parties. I love throwing them, I love themes (even before the advent of Pinterest) and maybe I can help inspire someone else. At the very least it will help me to relive them! We'll go backwards in time, for the first one we'll do the most recent..

 M's 9th Birthday Sock Hop  

(excuse my mom peakin in the side of this picture...I love parties, I'm no great photographer)

Not sure where we came up with the idea for this one, maybe watching Grease one day? But M was down with the theme from the beginning.

Invite

I originally had grand ideas for the invite, but was running short on time & found cute record invites at the party store on clearance! We have a winner! I did add to the invite, wording around the edge "Pony tails & poodle skirts, cuffed jeans & white t-shirts - the 50's were the time to bop, hope you'll come to the Sock Hop!"

Venue

With having an itty bitty house and 18! children invited, we are quite lucky our good friend Shannon lives in a community with a club house with plenty of room, best of all, besides security deposit it is free of charge! Let me tell you now, while I love to throw a good party, I love a good deal & getting the best bang for my buck!

 Decorations 

We opted for a hot pink and aqua color scheme, with a good dose of silver, black & records thrown in. I got quite a few good ideas on Pinterest along with some of my own. I loved the records that I picked up for .25 - .50 each at the thrift stores, along with the glass straw dispensers from Amazon.

I scored this cd player for free from a friend. Couldn't get to to play, but it looked great with the theme.

 

 

These record bowls were so easy to make!

Arrival

Instead of going with the popular photo booth, we went with a photo "car" as I was lucky & able to get a hold of an old car for the kids to take their picture in front of as they arrived. I later used these pictures as part of their thank you cards.

 Food

I wanted to give the kids the feel of being at a diner, so I made menus that they were able to order from. I donned a pen & pad and took each child's order. I had help from friends & family in the kitchen helping get the orders out. We put the food in food boats instead of paper plates to help add to the diner feel. For dessert, instead of cake, I did "milkshake" cupcakes, using Cool Whip frosting so that it was light like real whip cream but would hold up. I was able to pick up the little glasses at the Dollar store for .59 each

This was unfortunately the only shot of the menu I got. 

Enjoying their "Hound Dogs" and root beer floats

The super popular milkshake cupcakes

 Games

I wanted to keep with the time period so we did Freeze Dance to 50's tunes, Hula hoop contest and a bubble gum blowing contest. Oh yes, we also taught the kids the Hand Jive and an impromptu game of Simon Says started, who am I to argue with Simon Says!

Favors

I used old fashioned cardboard cars from Mel's Diner to put the favors in. I looked around online and they were definitely the cheapest at Mel's, no shipping either! I then filled them with candies that were around in the 50's. Most I was able to find at the Dollar store with a few filled in from Smart & Final. Added to the candy I included the glass from their cupcake!

Thank You Cards

I didn't get a picture of the Thank You cards, but I was pretty impressed with myself. I took all the pictures from the night and using the playlist I already had, put together a slideshow on a dvd for them. Then using the pictures I took of the kids with M in front of the car as they arrived, I used each one of those for the "album" cover, along with the wording "Thank you for coming" and in smaller type "The best hits of January 2013". Slid those into the cd case and had Madison jot a quick note on the inside.

Where I got some of my ideas:

R's Poodle Skirt
Record Bowls I so wanted to do the tiered record platters, but ran into many issues like - most of the records were too floppy to put much weight on & also the cupcakes were too high. Instead I just laid most of the ones planned as tiered platters around on the counter
Milkshake Cupcakes

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year...

Which means....Christmas Cards!!! So, back in the day, that is, before children, I almost always got my cards in the mail by the Friday after Thanksgiving. I worked a graveshift job back then, and in between actually working, I would hand address them all, including a nice little note inside to the recipient.

Fast forward to now, a frazzled mom of 2 kids, working part time outside of the home, full time inside the home, along with letting myself get roped into various other commitments. As much as I would love to go store to store, looking for just the right card, then laboring over all 50+ of them...I just don't have the time. And you know what? I don't have to, to have beautiful cards that I know everyone will ohh & awww over. Why? Because I have found Shutterfly's Holiday Cards!

All I have to do is pick my favorite picture...or pictures, which is great because we all know I'm indecisive, sit in front of my computer after the children are fast asleep & the house is peaceful, and with a few clicks I have my Christmas cards. I haven't 100% made the decision yet (go figure) but I'm pretty sure that I'm going with the "Pictures in Red" card, but with over 700 choices of Christmas cards, I know I have tons of options. In fact, the hardest part of ordering cards through Shutterfly might be determining which out of all the cards is THE one!

But best of all is...I get to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. We've decided that for Michael's parents this year, we are doing a portrait of the 3 grandchildren. Well, after I finish putting together my Christmas cards, I can go right here on Shutterfly's website to order a beautiful gallery-wrapped wall art of the children's picture. I just pick the size canvas I want, upload the picture and there you go. Or if you want to play around with it some, you can can crop your picture, take out red eye or change it to black & white, sepia etc.

Now I want to share the love with you! Bloggers get 50 free holiday cards from Shutterfly, follow the arrow à http://bit.ly/sfly2010

Enjoy!

Catch Up!!

Okay lets see...here goes a quick catch up from the last posting, which was about a month ago. These are not necessarily in chronological order...they are as I'm remembering them :)

1) M's first VCS Celebration of Arts dance performance. She made the best little squirrel ever! Seriously.



2)Miss Madison has made it through Kindergarten! Woohoo! And so has Mommy! Double woohoo! Michael was able to take the day off of work, which was nice. Her class marked her last day of kindergartenhood in a nice easy fashion. No caps & gowns and such. The festivities began @ lunch time when the parents were invited to have lunch with the kiddo's in the lunch room. I wish I would've not left my camera in the classroom (Michael & I had been there all day, helping out), because it was really neat to see the lunch room packed with all these families. During recess a few of us headed back to the classroom to set up for their performance of songs for the parents & their magic walk. The Magic Walk was at the end, when a red carpet was laid out. At the beginning of the carpet they were kindergarteners by the time they made it to the end, to Mrs. Piper, they had magically become 1st Graders.


The reason Mrs. Piper isn't smiling isn't because she doesn't like my child, but she was announcing to everyone about how she was MY kindergarten teacher also. Pretty cool huh?!

Our pretty cool class gift to Mrs. Piper. I had each of the children use fingerprints to make the blades of grass & the petals on the flowers. Erin (P) completed the rest, including the children's names on the bottom of it and the words "Thank you for helping us grow".


3)Dunn dunn dunnnnnnn....The Kitchen. So with our income tax return we decided we're going to redo the kitchen, which badly needs it. However we are still on an extremely shoe string budget. Lucky for us, we know some great people. Our good friend Time aka our general contractor, architect and Michael's golf buddy took our dimensions, our ideas and gave us ideas. So the plan is, knocking out a wall, moving the fridge, adjusting the sink & a bunch of other stuff. With a budget of $6500. Sound impossible...yeah, most would think that. But so far I'm making it work. We have not officially broke ground on it yet...but it is in the works. Keep look out for updates, because you are going to be impressed...I promise!

4)PTO - I'm crazy. I am now the Social Activities chair for the PTO. Be prepared to hear many things regarding this in the upcoming school year.

5)Riley. We can't forget Riley and believe me, she won't let you forget her. She is one determined, smart little thing. She keeps me on my toes from the moment she wakes up, to the moment I lay her down, and in many cases, for an hour or 2 after wards. I adore her, she adores giving me gray hairs. I need to get better about making notes of her firsts & all that stuff, because they are happening so quickly and I'm so forgetful!

Leaving you with one of my current favorite pictures of the girls. After her last day of school, under the watchful eye (hahaha) of Katelyn, the girls decided to go swimming in their clothes. Ahh, sometimes you just have to go with the flow

Yeah yeah yeah, so I've missed some postings. 10th anniversary, M's first Kindergarten field trip & so on, but I've got really big news to report. Yes, I said BIG.

Not only did I get up from the computer, but I baked something. But that's not the super BIG part. What did I bake? Ahhhh, that's where the BIG lies.

Well, it took me nearly 2 years, and countless hours of whining from my husband. There were quite a few times I'd look at that recipe, and it would come flooding back like yesterday, the moment I'd see the ingredients, flour, sugar and so on, I knew I didn't need the recipe. But then the trepidation would set in (or laziness, but trepidation sounds way more exciting to this story) and I wondered, would they be as good? What if?

But today I said to heck with it, and the moment I started cutting in the butter, I wondered why had I been putting it off. I knew this like the back of my hand. And now they are sitting baking away in my oven.

Oh, what are they you're probably still wondering - why, scones of course! But not just any scone, Georgina's Scones. Yes, hard to believe that it has been nearly 2 years since the last batch of Georgina's scones have been made, moist, melt in your mouth, drizzled with glaze, adding inches to your waistline but so worth it scones.

So there you go. Today has become a momentous occasion in my house. Not only did I bake again, I baked a Georgina's original, and now I won't have to hear Michael whine for a while. The sun is out, birds are singing and there is baked goodness in my home.

I'm sorry, what was that you said?

Today was Madison's appt with the ENT. As some of you may know, she failed the hearing test they give you in Kindergarten, when she failed it a second time, they sent a note home to be checked by her doctor. After following the dr's advice, a 3rd failed hearing test at the school, back to the doctor who did dislodge some more wax we were referred to the ENT.

However, we weren't just referred to the ENT for her hearing (that the dr was pretty sure would be ok now that they got out that wax), but for an enlarged right tonsil. At 5pm on a Friday night, the Dr. told us an enlarged tonsil can be lymphoma. Cancer. Okay. She did go on to say that it is very treatable etc, as well as other things. So being me, as much as I told myself I wasn't going to freak out, that night I did. I cried, I looked online, cried more & decided not to look online anymore lol. The irony of all of it was, most of that Friday night I was sitting on the couch covered in purple tulle, for the tutu's I was making to raise funds for Relay for Life.

Well, karma for doing something good for the American Cancer Society may have just come back to me. According to the ENT, her tonsil just looks like an enlarged tonsil. It isn't showing any of the other signs it would for Lymphoma. He is going to check it again in 6 months, but he thinks for what ever reason, her right tonsil is just like that. As long as it's not giving her issues, it will probably just "be there".

However, her hearing, that had been put on the back seat ended up being the real reason we were there. Hoping that the removal of wax would give her a clean bill of health ended up not being. They gave her a verbal audiology test, one with the sounds, a second one with something sending sound to her left ear outside/behind her ear & one that seals the ear for pressure. The prognosis - Otosclerosis. One of the little bones in her ear, that connects to the cochlea is not vibrating. He said for now, we pretty much just keep an eye on her hearing, she will be tested again in 6 months to see if her hearing has gotten worse or stayed the same. However, eventually she will probably need surgery, though they do not like to do the surgery before the teen years. The surgery will be the removal of that bone, and replacement with a prosthesis one. IF she begins to have a severe hearing loss before then, they will have to consider a hearing aid. Int he meantime, she needs to be sat on the left side of the room for school and then we wait it out.

So there you go....

Oh, and here is her Spring picture from school. Not overly impressed with it...I hate when photographers "wet comb" kids hair.

You are TUTU generous!

Celebrate, Remember, Fight Back
A quick run down....I'm on a team, The Sunblockers, for Vallejo's Relay for Life. For those that are not familiar, Relay for Life is the American Cancer Society's main fundraiser. It involves teams "relaying" around a track for 24 hours, to symbolize the around the clock fight cancer survivors and their care givers deal with every day. For more information check out What Relay For Life is

So, in my quest to raise funds for my Relay For Life Team, I am going to do a fundraiser once a month. I know it's difficult in these times to just be able to donate money, many of us need some sort of bang for our buck. There for, my intention is that each of my fundraisers will give you something, while allowing you to support a great cause.

For the month of March I will be making & selling Purple Tutus. Purple being RFL's color. So here is the rundown.

-Ages 0-3 years old - $15
-Ages 4-preteen - $18
any age other then that or special orders let me know & I'll work with you!

-Your choice of colors - Regular purple or a light (lilac) purple, or for an additional $2 I can do a combo of both. They will come with a purple ribbon bow.
-Waist measurement, if this is not possible, I will make according to my size chart. These are made with an elastic band so they will stretch.

These are great for photo ops, dress up & Easter fun.

These types of Tutu's retail for a bit more on Etsy.com and fairs, some as much as $30 or even higher. Not only are you getting a deal, but all profits, approximately 60% will be going to the American Cancer Society.

I can ship these, so this is not just for my local friends. Shipping charges based on USPS will be $4.90

Turn around time on your order will be about 1 -2 weeks, plus additional time for shipping.

Payment Options:
By credit card, you can go directly to my RFL site and make a donation there, however, if you need it shipped, I do need to have shipping charges payed via paypal.

By Paypal, my address is elindke@hotmail.com

By cash (if you are local) just email me and we will set that up.
See, I'm super flexible in getting your little girl in an adorable tutu while helping you support ACS!

This is an example of the tutu in the light (lilac) purple color as shown by Ms. Riley on her first birthday. The next one is of both girls from Christmas time, but they are in pink (this is offer is just for purple). But you can see how nice & full they are!