6 year old

Ice cream party!

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Ice cream birthday party

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM!  Actually the screaming didn’t get too loud!  🙂   Ok.. I’ll be honest, I never really know what to say in these intros, but sometimes I feel like I need to introduce each party!  🙂  Bla bla bla… I’m more of a picture person myself, so let’s just get right to the fun stuff!  🙂
 
First up the decorations:
I sorta threw this together last minute… I had made a large crocheted ball a few months ago as part of an experiment that didn’t work out.  And I had some of those cardboard like cones from Michaels from a previous party… so I hot glued on a ribbon hanger and rubber banded the tulle over my crocheted ball and shoved it in the cone.  Would have been cute with some beads glued on top for sprinkles. 

inflatable cone… what I am going to do with this after the party?

So, I painted this cone for a game, but realized it was too small… so it just became a decoration.

(Ice cream try number too for pin the cherry on the sundae)

to make ice cream cone garland… see THIS blog post

I saw these cute ice cream balloons on Pinterest, so I tried them… they are helium filled balloons, but what I found out was that the weight of the cone (paper) was so heavy that they wouldn’t stay up in a bouquet… so I just tied them tightly to each chair and that worked.  Still a fun idea though… if you try this with a lighter weight paper and it works, let me know.

I ran out of time to make a piñata, so I bought this at our local party store… I think it may have been the first time we used a piñata that wasn’t a pull string one… it was interesting!  (my girls are not much into hitting with a bat)
This was one of the games.  I had 4 buckets and filled 2 of them with some pom poms I made with this brilliant contraption.  And I bought these cute ice cream scoopers.  So, the game was a relay type race… there were 2 lines of kids and they had to scoop a ball of “ice cream” and run across the room to the empty bucket and drop it in and run back, then the next kid goes.  Which ever line finishes first wins.  We played a few rounds of this.  It was a nice calm active game for them! 



I may do a blog post about this game too.  Have you all heard of the Cupcake game?  It is a super cute easy game for kids.  I spent a bunch of time creating a game like it, but it was making an ice cream cone or sundae instead.  5 kids could play at each game, so I made 4 games total.  I will link to the post after I blog about that. 

Pin the cherry on top of the Sundae!

 

I found this cake pop kit on clearance at Michaels and it was just perfect for the party.  It was pretty easy to make… the instructions were well written and they looked adorable.

lot of syrups!

Lots of toppings!



and MORE toppings!  (I am always happy when I get to use this fun ferris wheel serving piece from what used to be Southern Living at Home.)

Here are those finished cake pops

popcorn cones

ice cream bowls from Oriental Trading

 
We had a ton of different cones, but the majority just wanted to use the fun bowls.  The plates and napkins were from Birthday Express

I had my helpers (sis and mom-in-law) pre-scoop the ice cream onto a cookie sheet and stuck it in the freezer.  Then when it was time to serve… we dumped them into bowls and they were ready to go.  This was super helpful and make things fast and not as messy!

chocolate chip mint

and vanilla

She didn’t want a cake, so candles went into the ice cream scoop!  🙂



party favors (in the green bucket there are THESE ice cream shooters for the boys)

These party pails were from oriental trading and they had the idea HERE

inside the pails there was Ice cream scented nail polish, tattoos, ice cream lip gloss and stickers.  (just the sticker and tattoos in the boy’s favors)

Note: on the instructions from Oriental trading… the didn’t say anything about how they got the blue / purple/etc color under the iridescent glitter… I just hot glued on some ribbon of the same color and then glued the glitter stuff on top!

 
Happy birthday sweet girl!
 

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!

Planning kids parties – Littlest Pet Shop

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They are still over 1 1/2 months away, but I am already starting to plan birthday parties for my soon to be one year old and soon to be three year old.  I LOVE planning parties.  I often spend way too much time planning them (that’s why I am starting so early).  I just love getting into the theme and finding cute games or cute crafts to do at the party.  I think my last one… a Littlest pet shop party for Elise’s 6 birthday was my favorite (at home) so far!  I think it turned out so cute.  Here is a little snippet from it: 
We started out with a bit of lunch:  for the kids I made either PB and J or cheese sandwiches cut out into animal shapes, the adults got subway sandwiches, then there was “my” infamous fruit salad, fishy crackers, animal crackers, carrots … I think that was it.

Then, we moved on to the craft:  Littlest pet shop masks.  In the weeks before, I had spent (again way too much) time finding pictures of petshop characters online, printing them out, then cutting shapes of the individual colors, tracing and cutting them out of that foam paper stuff, putting all the pieces into ziplock bags along with a picture of what the petshop character should look like when it is done… then the kids glued the pieces onto the mask and we punched holes on the sides and put an elastic string to make it a mask.  They turned out SUPER cute and I think the kids all liked them!  They were all different and I think I made at least 15 or 16 of them.
 After the craft, we did a pull-the-string pinata (which was a dud… so we ended up just ripping it open and dumping it out.)

 

And cake!

Lastly, we set up a little pet shop for Elise.  She was the pet shop owner and each kid was given some play money and they all waited in line to buy a pet from the pet shop.  (their party favor)… it was so cute.  I drew a cage onto some clearish-white favor bags, so they could put their pets in their cages to take them home. 


It was so cute and fun.  I will blog soon about my plans for the next couple of parties!  🙂