4 year old

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).

A few weeks ago, my daughter turned 4 and after changing her mind quite a few times, she decided on a princess party. So the first thing I did was hire a “real” princess to come out to our house. I had been to another birthday party and saw her there and she was amazing with the kids and told them a story with puppets for probably 20-30 minutes long and the kids were so engaged … boys and girls! She was great and had to much energy. So, I requested her to come. Then, the night before the party, the company called and said our princess threw her back out and wouldn’t be able to come the following morning and they don’t have any backups! Thankfully this all happened while I was out and my awesome husband, called another company and was lucky to find another princess with time to come out to our party! Whew! I was thankful I didn’t need to come up with other activities to do for the party or dress as a princess myself! Eeek. (Turned out she was great also, so another bonus.) The party was so cute and my daughter had a lot of fun.
Here are some pictures from the party: