Leilani's 5th Birthday

After the baby shower, we only had 2 weeks to prep for Leilani's birthday. She wanted a Cinderella Theme, then changed her mind last minute to Sleeping Beauty when she fell in love with the costume. This time around, we got smarter with the party planning and decided to outline it all first (Ben's idea of course). We used Pingg again for the invitations and uploaded a design we made using Word and SnagIt and printed a few at Walmart just to have some she could hand out to friends at school. On the day of, we had a trampoline out back, but the rain deterred most of the kids from using it until nightfall when the rain subsided, so most of the entertainment came from the scheduled games, food, and pinata. Here is what we wound up with.


THE MENU
This was originally thought of to resemble a 5 course meal (think royalty) and so we had fruit kabobs as appetizers. These were placed in centerpieces my mom made carving Sleeping Beauty that we found on this website. Then the main dishes were Barbacoa, Mole, Salad, and some Desserts, served outside buffet style.  The desserts were cupcakes and a cake. Leilani had fallen in love with the Barbie cakes, so we got an idea off the web and then my aunt just ran with it and created a fondant masterpiece. She also decorated all the individual cupcakes with blue frosting and little toothpicks with Sleeping Beauty’s picture on them as a sticker. We got a lot of good shots of the kids with blue faces from these.


THE TREATS & LOOT
We really scored on candy, mainly because I made sure to go on the day immediately following Halloween (Leilani’s birthday is Nov 10th so I’m lucky) and get everything that was on clearance. We filled the mason jars with candy and put tickets on them indicating how many tickets each was worth. We also got some clearance popcorn buckets with all the princesses on them, and since we owned a cotton candy machine and a coffee machine that plugs in to keep warm, we had a great concession stand with Cotton Candy, Popcorn, Hot Chocolate (with Marshmallows), and Candy. For the Goodie Bags, we just took a picture of Leilani, cropped out the background (you can do that with Word 2010 now), and posted it onto a pretty sunshine background to make an icon then printed it out on the 2" by 2" labels you can buy at your local office supply store. Then we made a template on word and printed our template on cardstock and cut out to size. We took sandwich size clear bags and filled them with candy, then just stapled the cardstock to the goodie bags. For the Pinata, we found a deal on a large Sleeping Beauty one for $15. The cool thing about these big ones is that they use a lot of carboard, and it compartmentalizes the inside of the piñata, giving you 1 piñata in the each leg, 1 in the torso, and 1 in the head for a total of 4 piñata's in one. So in short, we filled all of it and it took about an hour to get it all out which the big kids seemed to really love. Some of the smaller kids (Leilani included), were way too busy on the trampoline, working off their sugar rush to care about getting any more candy, they were satisfied with the loot they got at the concession stand (one kid had over 100 tickets he had won). 


THE GAMES

1. Slay the Dragon: A dragon dartboard, using the soft plastic golf balls wrapped in strips of Velcro, cardboard for the dragon, and an old backing of a couch for the target. 
2. Feed the Animals: Bean bag toss to feed the forest animals, depending on the size of the whole was the quantity of the tickets. 
3. Pin the Kiss: We wound up not using this one, we made it out of paper using Rasterbator to magnify the picture, then painted it and pinned it on some cardboard. We were going to have the kids pin a felt “kiss” onto her mouth and depending on the square, it would indicate the amount of tickets, but we ran out of room in the yard and just wound up using it as decoration in the living room. 
4. Fairy Knockdown: This was to emulate the 3 Fairies, since there were 3 tries. We just used the tins from some canned fruit and tennis balls. The number of cans knocked down will determine the size or value of the prize. 
5. Ring of Fire: This started out as “get the ring on sleeping beauty” but the paper mache didn’t turn out quite as expected, so we just painted it black, cut out some nails and used it as the Dragon’s Hand. Depending on if the toss makes it around the finger, they get tickets, the more they get on the same finger, the more tickets it is worth.
6. Blackbird bowling: Using Leilani’s existing bowling set, we create sock puppets to cover the bowling pins, all black like the Blackbird. It just took a package of children’s black socks, some tacky glue, some googly eyes, and some foam sheets. 

So all in all, the kids seemed to have a really good time, and they went away with some great loot. One of my nephew's exclaimed, "I can't wait for Leilani's Birthday next year!" to his parents, which was really great to hear. For the full gallery, click here.