Allison Turns 6!

We had quite an eventful weekend! It started on Friday night when we went out to a pre-birthday dinner for Allison. The dinner was great and afterwards I threw Jeff for a loop by asking if we should get Allison's ears pierced. She's been wanting to do it for awhile now and since it was almost her 6th birthday I thought it would be a special time to have it done. Jeff eventually gave into the idea (after plenty of hesitation and denial) and Allison did great - she didn't even flinch when they pierced her ears. Check out her new bling:

Okay, so you can barely see it in that picture, but she got small pink flower earings. Now I get to spend then next six to eight weeks dousing them with antiseptic, turning them and making sure they don't get infected (fun stuff!)

On Saturday, Allison turned 6 and we had almost 40 people here to celebrate. I was trying to do a small party this year since last year's party at Hoffman's Chocolate Factory was a bit off the hook. So I decided to do something at home and invite ten of her friends. But I also wanted to include her friend's siblings because she loves all of them just as much as her friends. In the end we ended up hosting almost 40 people. Every year I stress about the kids birthday parties and this year was no different. I had no idea what I was going to do until a few weeks ago. We were trying to come up with "theme" ideas when "The Princess and the Frog" theme was mentioned. At first I wasn't too crazy about it because I'm so over the princesses and am hoping that Allison will be soon as well (but I don't see that happening). But then Jeff mentioned how we could turn it into a "Mardi Gras" princess and the frog theme and then the wheels started turning in both of our heads. Since Jeff is from New Orleans, I thought this might be a good way to celebrate his heritage and Allison's 6th birthday at the same time. We had a bin (and when I say bin, I mean a BIG bin) full of beads from our trip to Mardi Gras back in 2003. They've been sitting in our attic for years now and it was time we put them to use! Jeff had a fun time going through the hundred of beads and organizing them by type, color, krewe, etc. When our guests arrived, the were instructed to choose and wear as many beads as they wanted from the selection below.
Here's Allison and Daniel right before the party, donning their beads:
And my dad and I:
The party planning was actually fun. The Mardi Gras colors are purple green and gold and I tried to stick with that color scheme for almost everything. I came up with crafts for the kids: decorate a mask, decorate a (purple, green, or gold) bag, and decorate a crown or a tiara. Here was the table I had set up:
And here are all the tables set up and ready for the kids to work on their crafts:
In addition to the crafts, we decided to do a pinata. But I wasn't really crazy about filling it with a ton of candy. So we decided to fill it with other things - like bouncy balls, doubloons, little plastic babies, mardi gras tattoos, and mardi gras confetti. Jeff had fun using his engineering skills to figure out how to put up the pinata. He ended up hanging it like this:

Here's another view:
Here is a close-up before it was hoisted up into the air:
But the hardest part of the party planning for me was figuring out what to feed everyone. I really wanted to stick with the New Orleans theme for the food but I knew a lot of the kids might not be crazy about eating spicy cajun food and I wasn't sure how the adults would feel about it either. So I ended up making a mixture of food. For the adults I had turkey, roast beef and chicken wraps. I was almost able to do purple, green, and gold wraps but I couldn't find any purple wraps (blue corn tortillas would have worked but were nowhere to be found within a ten mile radius of my house). So I used spinach (green), sundried tomato (orange, aka gold), and regular (off-white) wraps. I also made my famous orzo salad whose ingredients also followed the mardi gras colors: purple (okay, red) onion, green spinach, and gold-looking orzo (is that a stretch?). Plus the balsamic vinegar added some more purple. Of course I had to have at least one authentic New Orleans dish and I decided the easiest thing to make was a big batch of jambalaya. I ended up cooking it the day before because as much as I love the smell, I didn't want my house to reek of it when the guests arrived. This turned out to be a great decision though because having it sit in the refrigerator overnight allowed the flavors to combine and the consistency to be just right and man was it delicious (toot my own horn). For the kids I couldn't come up with anything too creative so I just went with Mickey nuggets and piggies in a blanket. I should have made two batches of the piggies because they went like hotcakes. Live and learn. We also had a colorful fruit salad which everyone enjoyed. Here's a picture of the spread:

But enough about the planning, let's talk about the actual party! When the guests arrived, they put on their beads and started working on their crafts. Yes, I knew my house would be a a disaster from the glitter, glue, decorations, feathers, stickers and everything else they had to work with but I didn't care - I just wanted them to have fun, and I think they did:

I wish I had more pictures of the crafts-making but it's hard to take pictures when you've got a party to run! After the crafts, everyone ate lunch and then it was time for "Pin the lips on the frog". I searched google images for a frog and a princess and came across a pretty great picture which luckily Jeff was able to print at work on the plotter (shhh..don't tell anyone from work about that). Then I also found some lips that I thought would work well and printed them on cardstock (and tirelessly cut out each one)! We blindfolded the kids and each had a turn to pin their lips on the frog:
In the end, the frog was well lipped!
Next we sent the kids out to the patio and gave them each a little bottle of (purple, green or gold) bubbles:
Then it was time for the main event - the pinata. We didn't really want to do the "hit the pinata" because we didn't think this one would bust very easily. So we opted for the pull strings. However for this particular pinata, all the strings had to be pulled at once. Well, we had 19 kids and 20 strings so the numbers worked out well. When the time came, here's what happened:



So after that debacle, it was time for cake! And it wouldn't be a princess and the frog party without a princess and the frog cake:
We all sang happy birthday, Allison blew out her candles and made a wish:
All in all it was a fun party. On their way out, each child received an umbrella (which they could use to do the second line dance out the door, even though none of them had a clue as to what that was). On the umbrella, I attached a little note:
Even Riley got into the spirit of the party:
After most of the guests had left we were all exhausted, but Allison couldn't wait to open her gifts. She received a lot of fun arts and crafts projects, some really cute clothes, a cd player and a karaoke machine! Our gift to her turned out to be too big to wrap so we had to blindfold her. I'm sure it drove her nuts that everyone could see the gift but her:


Between the piano and the karaoke machine I'm sure we'll have plenty of videos to post. Daniel is even getting in on the fun.



That night we had another party to attend for our friend's 40th birthday and the kids didn't go to bed until 11:30! Daniel slept until 10:30 the next morning but I was up early to clean up a bit and then headed out to one last party for the weekend - a baby shower. It was definitely a crazy, fun, exhausting weekend and boy am I pooped.