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Frogs, Snails, and Puppydog Tails Baby Shower

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A couple months ago, I hosted a small baby shower with a super fun and cute theme: Frogs, Snails, and Puppy dog tails.  Here are a couple pictures:

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Covered the table with burlap and covered the vases with darker brown burlap

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Froggy watermelon carving. I found the instructions HERE. So cute!  Napkins are from Amazon.

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I made “snails” from ham and a cream cheese pesto mixture rolled up in tortilla shells. My plan was to do THIS with pickles for the body, but my time ran out… still looked snail-like without that though!  Frog candies and frog bath toys are from Amazon.

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Puppy dog tails are crockpot little smokies. Here is the super easy recipe I used.

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The yummy desserts are from Whole Foods bakery… yummo!

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And the straws are also from Amazon.com

We just played one game and it was the baby shower Memory Game that I mentioned way back HERE.

For more ideas, check out my pinterest board and also check out these SUPER cute framed pictures from ETSY… LOVE this shop!!

Thanks for stopping by!

My Little Pony Party

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It looks like we have turned a corner with my oldest and she has really wanted to help in the planning of her birthday parties.  I always let the kids pick the theme they want, but she wanted to be really hands-on with the decorations and what activities we would do and the order of the party.  Looks like I am training up another little planner!  🙂  She wanted a My Little Pony party this year.  I had seen that Hasbro has blank white My Little Pony that you can order, so I ordered some of those.  I had no idea how we would decorate those, but we decided on Permanent Markers… you can color the hair and everything.  I wanted the girls to be able to take them home and not get wet paint all over.  If you have more time, I would recommend the markers for the hair and then probably acrylic paint would be better for the body and produce a more even look and glitter glue for some sparkle.

Without further ado, here are the pics! 

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Outer Space Baby Shower

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A few months ago, I hosted an Outer Space baby shower for a friend and her baby boy.  Thanks to my friend Liz, I didn’t have to do much with the food, so I got to focus on my favorite things:  the decorations, games and favors!  Here are the pictures with descriptions below them:

deirdre_invite_proofEThe invitation created in Adobe Illustrator

IMG_3639This is a foam wreath, covered with white tulle.  Then I cut out the rocket, star, and banner with my cricut and just pinned it onto the foam and added a ribbon to hang it.

IMG_3642Here is another banner made from my Cricut.

IMG_3648Here, I printed out different planets and cut them out.  You can use a glue stick on the picture side of the paper and paste them to the bottom of a clear plate to go with the theme of the party.

IMG_3647 The food and cut out stars scattered around.

IMG_3645I bought these whirly decorations of Amazon.

IMG_3644More cut out stars strung and displayed around.

IMG_3643  Fun baby shower Memory game.  Instructions HERE

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The favors were popcorn balls with a little blue food coloring!

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Strawberry Shortcake Party!

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Welcome to Berry Bitty City!

Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry shortcake!  The song is still in my head 3 weeks later!   LOL   This party turned out cute, but I wasn’t on top of things as I normally am (I have to start months early for the April birthdays since we have 2 of them and I ordered the stuff early, but didn’t get to the crafting part early enough) … so it was a little stressful at the end.  But it all worked out and my daughter had a great time!  We had about 16 kids or so this time.  The kids arrived and started on a coloring sheet/maze activity, then we played some games, had some cake and she opened her presents. 
 
Strawberries are cut from the Hello Kitty cricut cartridge. 

 
My wonderful older daughters did all the coloring of the dots with some sharpie markers!  We just taped on the leaves and stem.  (warning… don’t let your kids play with these balloons when you take them down… the sharpie comes off everywhere… TRUST me!)

Strawberry confetti from birthday express, Table cloth from oriental trading.  The maize printout and coloring sheets are from the strawberry shortcake website.

My grandma crocheted these Strawberry shortcake dolls for me when I was a kid and I still had them.  They are amazing and worked great for centerpieces!



balloons from birthday express

This was a HUGE decoration that worked great for filling up a wall!  And only $6 at birthday express 

Images from google and bing image search.  Again… make sure you go to advanced search and search only for images with a high resolution to look better with printing!

 
This piñata was an idea I found on Pinterest from Grey Luster girl.  She is amazing at parties and had a lot of fun ideas!
I did make it into a pull string piñata because my girls prefer them.  (my string broke this time though… which was a bummer).  For instructions on making a pull string piñata see HERE

 
Strawberry Shortcake pin the strawberry on the vine game from Shindigz

Birthday girl!!

 
I made a bunch of these out of felt and we used them to play a musical chairs game.  Most of the kids have never played that before and were not happy about me taking them away.  LOL.  But it was fun to watch them figure it out.
 
We had strawberry shortcake music in the background!  You know… the ones that are still in my head!  (there are a lot of different strawberry shortcake albums available… we liked the Strawberry Jams and Let’s Dance the best.)



For the food, we had strawberry applesause, Strawberries, dried strawberries, Chocolate wafers, Pretzel thins, homemade suckers, cupcakes, and beverages.  Most things are from Trader Joes. 

I love making candy!  It is a pretty fast process if you have all the right tools.  I bought this hard candy mold from sugarcraft.  I also recommend getting the large candy funnel… Works great!  THIS was a helpful blog when I first started to make candy (without my mom, that is)!
chocolate cupcakes

I made a simple buttercream frosting with powdered sugar and butter (but I only used about 1/2-2/3 as much sugar as the recipe called for) and I added strawberry flavoring to it.  Oh man.. it was so yummy!

Remember these?  I don’t think I ever did say how I made them… They are from the flower shoppe cricut cartridge… probably my most used cartridge!  So many things you can use flowers for!  Anyway, you use a fancy pearl pin to pin them to the Styrofoam ball topiary.  (Be sure to store them out of the sun when you aren’t using them because the colors can fade)
 

Enjoying some goodies!
Ok… there were so many fun favors to do this time… I may have gotten a little carried away.  It was still under $5 per kid though which is my max.  🙂 
So, I bought THIS cricut cartridge just for this party and it made the 3D strawberries in the basket and the basket.  So fun!  Inside the 3D strawberries are strawberry daiquiri jelly bellies.  And also in the basket there is a packet of strawberry flavored Annies fruit snacks and strawberry Kelloggs pastry crisps.

These mini hand sanitizers are from bath and body works and I tried to find the fruity scents and just make my own label for them in Photoshop, printed on sticky paper and stuck them on!  🙂

Also there are coloring books and bubble wands ($1 each at Michaels).
 

 



Angry birds party

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Birthday party season is on its way for us again this year, starting off with our 7 year old daughter’s angry birds party!  When I was researching other Angry bird parties online, I noticed how so many of them had a real life angry birds game set up in their yards!  I loved this idea and started saving boxes 2 months before the party.  But, since she has an October birthday, it is typically too rainy here in Washington to have the party outside, so we moved all the furniture to one side of the living room, removed anything breakable and set up an area to have balls, boxes, and pigs flyin!  I did think that the game was going to entertain them longer than it actually did though.  I think they got tired of waiting in line or something.  I think they had fun despite the craziness at times!  Here are the pictures:


I just made these in Photoshop, printed and cut them out.
 
Another print and cut project.  Nora had fun taping them on the wall.

Since we didn’t know a lot of people from Nora’s class yet, I wanted to make sure that I knew if there were any allergies, etc.  So, I made up this little sign in.  Pretty cheesy, but helpful info to know!
Angry balloons!



I found a printout for these faces to stick to the balloons.  I just used full sheet sticker paper to print them onto.  They buckled a little, which I expected, but still a fun and inexpensive decoration.
All these little plush Angry birds I got at Costco and Zulily.



Love this large display I found at birthdayexpress.com
 
This is the craft we did as kids arrived: Backpack clips!.  Mine sorta faded because I put too much glue on the back… whoops.  First, put the front side of the image (I had many different angry birds to choose from) onto the circle epoxy stickers (a much better price than I paid by the way),  then glue the back to the bottle cap and you can punch a hole in the top of the bottle cap with a tiny round puncher, stick in a ring and the fastener thingy.  You can also make them as necklaces, but I was trying to be more gender nuetral. 
 
I covered the boxes with white or brown paper and painted the brown ones to look like wood.  The kids arranged the first set and placed the pigs.

 
sling shot from amazon for balloons, but it worked well to fit these little foam angry birds balls. 



This little game would have worked a little better for a calmer party… fyi.
 
I wish I would have taken pictures of the progress as I made this pinata.  I did paper mache over a balloon and let that dry for a couple days, then I cut a square hole in the bottom because a pull string pinata was requested.  Here is the “how to” I have used for the pinatas I have made.  I thought it would be perfect to use the beat up pig for the pinata, so I just printed and cut those pieces to put on.  🙂 

I love making my own pull string pinatas because they actually work!  (I bet you could convert a store bought regular pinata into a pull string as well.)

candy and stickers flying!
 



Just simple snacks this time… those are Angry birds cheese-its!
 
Just happened to see this cookie pizza at Albertsons a few days before the party and how could I not get it!



just bought a plain chocolate cake and decorated with cookies, kit kats, a quickly made sling shot out of wire and black tape,  and these cute little guys

 



prescooped ice cream… so glad I did this!

party favor bags: including tattoos, a mini plush angry bird, angry bird fruit snacks and their craft and candy from the party.

Happy birthday Nora!!

Dr Seuss baby shower

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Oh, The Places You’ll Go!  Well, that happens to be my friend’s favorite children’s book, so it was easy to come up with a plan for what theme to do her baby shower.  Mary and I went to work with the planning.  I was so thankful that Mary decided to take care of all the food and I did the decorations and games because I am not a huge fan of the food part and that’s the part that always feels more stressful to me (due to its more last minute nature).  Man, this was a fun shower to plan, with pretty much free rein of all those bright colors and the whimsical style of Dr. Seuss stuff, and all the ideas I found online.  (I couldn’t do any pinterest pinning this time though, because I wanted the guest of honor to be surprised!, so I had to do thing the “old fashion” way… Bing and Google!)  There was a lot of good ideas out there, so thank you everyone!  It probably was one of my favorite showers to help create!

Here are the pictures!

These were inspired from the book Oh, the Places You’ll Go and I had some extra large cardboard in the garage, so I just cut out the shapes and spray painted them and duct taped them together in the back and a little to the house to keep them from falling down.
Tried to imitate the balloons from the book also.  Colored the striped (after they were blown up)  with permanent markers
The trees also inspired from the book.  I made these by using 5 sheets of tissue paper, accordian folded them and wired them around the center (just like the regular tissue paper puffs), cut both outer edge into a point, Then I used a heavier wire from Home Depot cut it twice the length needed, took a balloon clip weight, put the wire through the hole to the middle of the wire and folded the wire in half.  Then, with the ends of the wire toward the prepared tissue, I wrapped the thin wire around the tissue paper around the heavy wire to attach.  Next, I took black duct tape and wrapped it around the heavy wire to hide it all the way down to the balloon clip.  I did also have to wrap the taped wire around the balloon clip a little bit to make it strong enough to hold the flower up and then clipped it to the buckets (or anything you want).  Last, I fluffed out the tissue paper, mostly just one on side, so the top stays mostly flat to look like the Dr Seuss trees.  And voila!

I also loved the vases (idea I found online) wrapped with a blue boa and hot-glued the ends together.
Momma-to-be in all her glory!
Dr. Seuss phrases and characters for around the house!  (Printed and cut out)

Everyone had fun doing this and there sure were some funny ones!

One of the games (203 was the answer by the way).  Another game not shown was a crossword puzzle.  You can create your own here.  So, I did it fill-in-the-blank style based on the book, Oh The Places You’ll Go.
The 3rd game we played.  Some may recognize from a previous shower I did.  I had a lot of fun with Photoshop and took random baby faces and super-imposed them over celebrities and the guests needed to guess the celebrity.
I remembered I had this teapot my mom bought for my girls, so I just HAD to do the fish in the pot!

Food table
plates from Celebrate Express
Mary made this wonderful diaper silverware holder!

Party favors
Congrats sweetie!  Can’t wait to meet the little one!

Owl baby shower for a girl

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I suppose some of you remember when I did an owl baby shower last year for my friend’s baby boy?  Well, recently I hosted another owl shower for a little girl and it looked completely different!!  It was such a fun shower to do because my friend just adopted a baby girl, so the little one was able to come to her own baby shower and it was just such a sweet time celebrating this wonderful act of love and redemption. 

The inspiration for the shower was the crib bedding they chose for the nursery from Pottery Barn Kids here.  I have to thank Renee, Katy, Meghan, and Lisa for helping me with the food, supplies and decorations.  I didn’t even have to do any of the food prep, so I am very thankful for that!

banner thanks to the handy Cricut!  🙂
I love this shot of the guests of honor chatting on the chair!  It is precious.
Renee painted this lovely design on the wood letters and also the bird houses.  The branches, birds and 2 owls are printed on cardstock, cut and taped to pictureshelves (or wall). 

 

So cute, right?


Found this adorable owl at a local gift shop!




The food table


The topiaries were made by painting ceramic pots, inserting a piece of styrofoam in the bottom (covered up with some dried filling stuff), painted wooden dowel, the top is a styrofoam ball (I did paint this a quick covering of pink before I started)covered with paper flowers and leaves (cricut flower shop cartridge) and attached with a pearl stick pin.

The little ceramic birds are from Finland

Love these plates/napkins from Party Pail

Great idea Meghan to put fruit into krumkake shells

These petit fours were amazing!

Thanks Trader Joes

Lisa’s bacon wrapped dates

Chicken yummy on pitas

Lisa made these super cute chocolates for party favors

And the sweet Maya herself!  Such a precious gift from God!!  Welcome sweet little one!

Candyland Birthday Party

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Welcome to Candyland!  This was a super fun party to create (but I think I do say that about most of the kid’s parties).  I decided to set up the house to look like a life-size candyland game board.
I did have a hard time getting started, so first I studied the candyland board games:  we have an older one and the new style one.  I actually used more from the older one, because I liked the variety of candy characters/places better.  The new board is a little too.. um.. busy… and the candies are a little more similar to each other.  Anyhoo… so I made of list of the “areas”:  Plum trees, rainbow trail, peppermint forest, gumdrop mountains, Licorice Castle (changed to Licorice Lagoon from the newer game), Peanut Brittle House, Lillipop Woods, Ice Cream Sea, Molassis Swamp (changed this to Chocolate Swamp), and last, but not least the Candy Castle.  I just started brainstorming ideas for each area and jotting those down.
I even made a playlist of candy related music to play, but then forgot to play it… boo.

Then I drew this rough map of my living rooms/kitchen… and how I wanted to set up the “game” (where all the sections would go).

I ordered supplies from my 3 favorite party websites:  Oriental Trading, Shindigz, and Birthday Express.  Also picked up some things from Ben Franklin, Bartells, The Dollar Tree, and Fred Meyer. 
So, I always find it easiest to just talk about the party as we go along.  So, here’s what the guests arrived to:

The giant lollipops are made from ballons taped to a baton I found at the dollar store and then wrapped in cellophane.  I stuck them in buckets filled with sand to keep them upright.
Aren’t these 2 great!  they’re from oriental trading!

As we were waiting for everyone to arrive, we had the kids decorating their goodie bags.  Note: don’t use elmers glue when doing this… took too long to dry… next time I will only use the stickers/sticky backed jewels.  lesson learned.

When everyone got there, we played the game.  I had taken out the colored cards from the board game and each kid drew a card and moved to that color square on the floor.  There are a ton of pictures, so I will just post a bunch!

Some stations had a little goodie bag gift to put in their bags.  We actually went back around a second time to grab those.  🙂
The rainbow trail led to the punchout game and the peppermint forest.

At the other end of the rainbow, I placed a “punch-out” game that I made.  See my previous blog post to see how we did that.  This we also came back to play on our second time around the game, so each kid just took a turn punching and getting a prize.

Candy canes and candycane pencils for the goodie bags.
I added glue and glitter to these popcorn and trash buckets from the dollar store to make them look like gumdrops.
I pinned bright colored blankets over beanbag chairs and pillows to make them look like the gumdrop mountains and the kids had to climb over them!  🙂
Here, I hung streamers to hopefully look like black licorice and the coat rack worked perfectly to make the licorice tree!

hung 2 brown curtaina that I had in my dining room, with pressure rods over the doorway for Grandma Nut’s peanut brittle house.

Inside the peanut brittle house I printed and cut out peanuts to hang from the ceiling and also taped some to the wall.

more cellophane covered ballon lollipops.  didn’t know how to get them to stand up, so I propped up a baby gate and covered it with a blanket.. then stuffed in the dowels.  (note that the bigger 3 lolli’s are attached to white wrapping paper rolls and the 6 smaller lolli’s are on wooden dowels)

You may remember the ball shaped decorations from here:  so I covered those with cellophane and whallah!  Dave helped me with the string between the walls to hang them from.

 Whew… hang in there only a couple more places to visit!

DO NOT EAT… these are play putty.  I was excited to find something for the theme that wasn’t candy!!
bubble wrap on the floor, so they can pop through the ice cream sea (the board game had lot of bubbles around Queen Frostine, so since a bubble machine probably would have been a little too messy for inside, I thought of this. 
not much decoration here.. just some more brown curtains on the floor for the chocolate swamp and a bench for a bridge to crawl over it!
Here is home of King Kandy!  Lots of yummies that the kids got to go around and load up their goodie bags!  (sorry parents)

this would have worked a lot better with dummies instead of these suckers… but oh well.

bought a plain white half sheet cake from Fred Meyer and then decorated it with colored fondant and lots of goodies!

The gingerbread pieces are from the board game

this is the older board game… like the one I grew up with.

Happy birthday to my amazing 6 year old!

We had a hoot! (Owl Themed baby shower)

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So, last weekend I hosted a baby shower for my bestie.  She is going to have a boy in August!  It was probably the most fun baby showers I have planned so far.  There are a lot of cute ideas for owl themed stuff out there, but actually most were geared toward girls (AKA pink)  and others were more “barn owl” style, which is a little too flea market like for what I was looking for.  But I still did get a lot of great ideas from my online research. 
So after the date was decided, I got the guest list from the momma-to-be and saw that it was 59 people… so, first thing on my to do list was to recruit help!  So, thanks to 5 other wonderful ladies, I had enough help to make this an awesome shower for her.  I did most of the decor and party favors while the other ladies took care of all the food, games, prizes and other random details.  So, thanks again to Michelle, Rachel, Sarah, Ursula, and Christy for helping me!

Anyway… I suppose you’d like to see the pictures now, huh?  Here goes:

Banner made from paper and buttons and some garden twine.  (idea from here)

I found these awesome hanging decorations here.  They were pretty easy to make.  The large ones take 12 sheets of 12X12 paper… the small ones that I made are  5 1/2″ diameter.
close up detail

Printed out these branches (actually 4 sheets, glued together) and covered my picture frame shelves with them.  I am really happy with how they turned out and it was such an easy way to add to the decor.  The green owl is also a printout.  Thanks to a friend, I was able to borrow some owl things (top shelf) and found a couple crochet patterns online and made a couple more.)
Crocheted owl … pattern found HERE

Another crocheted owl… HERE is the pattern
The tables

Owl printout (2 sheets glued together to be double sided) and I didn’t glue the bottom, so that it could just sit in the branches.

Gorgeous owl vase borrowed from a friend

Borrowed Owl Pitcher
Borrowed stuffed owl

One of the games
Napkins

Michelle made the super cute food labels and the food was amazing!  sooo yummy

Adorable owl cupcakes

These are the party favors.  I sewed these little owls sorta using THIS idea (original pattern here), but redesigned the pattern a little to make them able to open … and used a small piece of velcro to hold the beaks shut.  Then I made some homemade caramel corn to fill them with (in little baggies) … I just used up buttons from my collection, so each owl was one of a kind.
Lastly, here are some other links for ideas:
A Creative Momma
Thoughtfully Simple
Owl Hand Puppet
Owl pillows

SUPER cute Owl purse

So there you go!  Congrats Angie and can’t wait to meet the new little guy!

Around the World birthday party

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A couple nights ago, we celebrated Elise’s 7th birthday with an Around-the-World birthday party.  We had 12 girls here and we boarded Birthday Airlines and visited 7 different locations on 7 different continents.  It was a fun party to plan and she and the other girls had a great time.  Here are the details!
When each girl arrived, we welcomed them and I took their picture (to put it their passports later), then they went over to see Agent Elise at the US Customs and Immigration table where they were given a passport with their name inside.  I got these cute little passports from Oriental Trading.

Then the girls were given these itineraries to color while we waited for the other guests to arrive:
So, we then all loaded the “airplane” (and all the kids grabbed onto a rope).  We (my husband and I) introduced ourselves as the pilot and flight attendant and we described briefly that we will be visiting different countries and getting souvenirs from each place we visit. 
our name tags

1st stop:  North America – USA – Minnesota – Mall of America
We made a stop at the Mall of America in Minnesota (upstairs in our room) as our USA stop.  There, the girls took turns “shopping” for their luggage to take on the trip.  They also received a USA glitter tattoo and a red, white and blue sucker.  Then we “stamped” their passports for the next stop.

forgot to take a picture before the party, but all the purses were lined up top.
the “luggage” they each picked one

2nd stop: South America – Peru
We flew back downstairs to Peru (the dining room) where all the kids were able to decorate maracas with wood markers. The maracas were the souvenir.

For each country, I printed out their flag, map and a few pictures from the country.
the inside of the passports… there was a country stamp and I printed an animal or icon on sticker paper to stick in there.

3rd stop: Africa – Kenya
Next up was Kenya (the living room).  Here we played Safari bingo.  I made bingo cards with a lot of different safari animals.  There was no prize for the winner, but the girls had a fun time.  I didn’t have bingo markers, so I used cut up post it notes… worked ok, but they really stuck together, so it was a little difficult for the girls to use, but the good thing was that they stayed in place if they moved or bumped their cards.  
The souvenir for Kenya were safari animal charms (2 per child) in a little package I made out of ziplock snack bags (because I forgot to buy tinsy jewelry type ziplock bags… these would have been much better.)  They also got to keep their bingo cards (which they were surprisingly excited about).  🙂
Oh.. and we played African music in the background during the game.

4th stop:  Europe – France
After “stamping their passports”, we headed over to France in the family room.  Here, thanks to Instant Netflix, we watched an episode of Madeline (was supposed to be the one about the Eiffel Tower, but there was a technical issue and they watched the one about the Louvre).  Madeline is a cartoon about a girl from France.  While they were watching the 20 minute show, it gave me time to set out the food and cook the pizza.  After the show, they collected their Eiffel Tower charms (ordered from Etsy and shipped from China… he he) and their Euro chocolates (from World Market) and they took a quick train ride to Italy for some pizza, breadsticks, salad, fruit and juice boxes.

After lunch we headed to our 5th stop:  Asia – China
China needed to be in the entryway (I was running out of rooms).  In China, we played pin the tail on the dragon with a dragon I printed out and taped together to make a large dragon and I printed out extra tails.  (it was hard to find a dragon that wasn’t too scary looking!)  I had also purchased supplies for making a ribbon dragon craft, but the kids were getting a little restless at this point, so I just sent that home to make with their mommies.  It would have been a lot of glueing anyway.  They also got these gorgeous wood fans and a fortune cookie for their souvenirs.

Next, off to the 6th place: Australia
Australia was in Elise’s bedroom and here we played a fun game with the girls.  We formed 2 teams and had a kangaroo hop race (with a globe between their knees).  🙂  Good to get a little of that energy out.  The souvenir was a pink or purple boomerang and an inflatable globe) 

Last stop (bet you can guess): Antarctica
Antarctica was in the kitchen, but we needed tables, so it was more of a fly by Antarctica (too cold to stop there anyway, right?)  The activity for here was melting their ice to find the prize inside.  We gave each girl a cup of hot water to melt their ice cube and inside was a chain (so they could put their charms on it)

I also printed out pictures of the kids I took in the beginning onto sticker paper and they put them in their passports above their name. 
The plan was to fly back to the US for cake, but we technically never did fly back.  We just stayed where we were, sang Happy Birthday for ice cream cake.  Then, opened presents and the girls had time to free play a little before their parents came to pick them up.  It was a really fun party, I think!  Happy birthday Elise!!