Margaret's Let's Go to the Circus Party

We went far bigger than usual for Meg's fourth birthday party. She and I both had such fun brainstorming and executing all the details, and for her first "friends party," I'd call it a rousing success.

Welcome to the backyard Big Top!

Eat Up!

The treats table featured popcorn, peanuts, circus train animal crackers, and raspberry lemonade. Sadly, I couldn't find boxes of Cracker Jacks anywhere! Party hats, confetti poppers, and punch balloons were free for the taking.

I wanted the cupcakes to turn out better than most of my culinary ventures do, so I ordered some from the grocery store bakery. I ordered chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting piped on with a round tip and was handed these... and for double their estimated price! Not quite what I'd pictured, but they looked fine once we put them in festive liners, sprinkled on some candy-coated sprinkles, and popped on homemade pinwheels and colored-flame candles.

Let the Games Begin!

I added our wooden beanbag toss game with a pail of plastic balls at the last minute. The dads in attendance ended up giving it more attention than any of the children did.

Meg's Nana, Nan, and Auntie tied endless balloon animals and swords, and Nana painted everyone's faces.

After playing outside for an hour or so, we invited everyone inside for cupcakes and a magic show performed by Auntie. Naturally, I videoed the show and forgot to take a single photo.

Meggie was our afternoon's ringmaster, fittingly.

The first of thousands of balloon sculptures.

Rainbow Dash proved to be a popular choice for face painting.

Pinata loot: finger traps, paper yoyos, fortune telling fish, bubbles, stickers, pom pom balls, colored Band-Aids, and glitter glue pens.

Little brother was to be a strong man, with a mustache and chest hair painted on, but he managed to sleep through the entire party and only wake up in time to pick through the leftover snacks.

Someone had a great day!

And, oh, the mess afterward!

Nature Boy Birthday Party

We celebrated Jamie's second birthday in November with a nature-inspired party.

Our palette was bright red, robin's egg blue, greens, brown, and metallics. For the nature element, we brought in tons of stars and nodded toward this time of transition between autumn and winter with felt autumn leaf table scatter and a wintry cake.

Since he's still so young and his birthday falls right in the thick of the holiday season, we kept things simple and focused on small, pretty details for the cake table.

We had tons of party hats left over from Meg's party, so I turned one inside out, covered it in coordinating paper, glittered a number two, and added a yarn pom pom to the top. I like having a special party hat each year for the birthday child to wear in cake photos and later to tuck away in their memory boxes as a memento of the day.

As has apparently become our tradition of sorts, the drinks were served in glass milk bottles. I used washi tape labels to mark names. The birch-look paper straws are Kikkerland. I purchased them from Amazon.

I painted the wooden forks with food-safe soy paint. I taped off the straight lines with painters tape, and I used circle stickers to tape off the polka dots. I used a bronze Sharpie to add detail, but it bled a bit, so I would use a paint pen instead if I ever do it again.

I folded the napkins using these simple instructions.

I love a cheery bunch of balloons on the birthday child's chair.

The balloons were secured with baker's twine and decorated with sweet satin bows.

This year was a big deal for me, because it marked the first successful cake I've ever made. I am severely cake challenged, and every year I end up crying and swearing in the kitchen the morning of my kids' party, elbow-deep in batter and frosting, because I have no clue what I'm doing when it comes to baking. This year, I went with a simply decorated cake, and I searched the internet for tips on the baking and frosting before beginning. It's nothing special, really, but I couldn't be happier that it turned out just as I'd hoped it would.

The trees are from Amazon, and I'll admit I wasn't crazy about how cheap they looked in person. The top of the cake was coated liberally in Wilton edible glitter stars.

For entertainment, James spent a leisurely afternoon opening gifts while we all visited with family, and we all played this darling Belle and Boo version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

And here's my beautiful big boy on his day.

His Papa encouraged him to try this!

December Activity Shelves

This year's December activity shelves revolve, surprisingly enough, around winter and Christmas.

As usual, the top two shelves are filled with themed activities while the lower two hold a variety of non-themed toys.

Our sensory bin is a white dish tub from Dollar Tree. It's filled with white rice scented with almond extract (I'd originally planned to use mint, but we were out), a bit of glitter, miniature mylar gift bows from Dollar Tree, and a scoop that I believe we purchased from Target's Dollar Spot earlier this year.

Our treasure basket holds a few of the same things our Shiny Stuff Treasure Tin held last year (holographic foil tissue paper, a large jingle bell, and a shiny gift bow), but we've also added some other jingly instruments.

There's an art tin with a variety of papers - old dollar store greeting cards, pages from a Christmas picture book that got ruined, a snowman notepad, and festive foam shapes from Target's Dollar Spot after-Christmas clearance last year - as well as feathers, spangles, scissors, glue, and markers.

We have a basket of books about various December holidays and wintry fun, some plush reindeer the kids were given last year at "Story Time with Mrs. Claus" at the mall, and a tree stacker from Plan Toys (purchased for a steal at the consignment store, since it was massing the top piece).

Previous Seasonal Activity Shelves
February and Valentine's 2013
Springtime and Easter 2013
Autumn 2013

Previous Seasonal Sensory Bins
Springtime and Easter 2013
Autumn 2013

Previous Seasonal Treasure Baskets
Autumn 2012
Winter 2012
Valentine's 2013

Previous Seasonal Shelf Activities
Christmas 2012
Valentine's 2013
Halloween 2013

Halloween Colored Glue Suncatchers

We got the idea for these colored glue suncatchers from the fabulous early childhood blog, Teach Preschool.

To make the colored glue, we filled empty condiment bottles ($1 apiece from Wal-Mart) with white school glue and a squirt of tempera paint. You can use food coloring or liquid watercolor to tint, if you prefer. I stuck autumn and Halloween cookie cutters (a Wilton set - $4 at Michael's) to contact paper to hold them in place.

Meg simply filled the cutters up with the glue. I encouraged her to use different colors in the same cutter to highlight features, but she wanted to stick with one color per cutter. Just as well, because the glue did run quite a bit and the colors may have mixed too much. I've read that you can run a bead of hot glue around the inside and outside of the cutters to prevent the colored glue from escaping underneath, but, despite a lot of leakage, our cutters were still nice and thick, so I don't think it's necessary.

The shapes took a few days to dry, but they finally remained firm instead of sticking when we lifted a corner to peek underneath. The oranges and reds dried the slowest, probably because they had more pigment. After we popped them from the cutters (much easier when they're still a bit stretchy, by the way, than if you let them harden completely), we poked holes in the top and bottom of each shape and strung them together with thread to hang in the windows. For fun, I added some faces and other simple (very simple) features with a Sharpie before we hung them, like so:

This was one that we left in the cutter until it hardened completely, and you can see that his hand and tail didn't pop out cleanly.