Finally, a Birthday Party

Gabriella's patience was certainly tested with the two week delay of her birthday party. We finally had her party this morning and it went quite well. Two of the five little girls weren't able to make it, but we still had a lot of fun.

Here is the fabulous invitation Jonathan made. Our address and the date etc.... have been removed from this copy. This is one of my favorite pictures of Gabriella and I thought the invites turned out super cute. Jonathan made the tiara graphic from scratch on photoshop. Seriously. He didn't use any starting image and we don't even have a wacom tablet. He just "drew" it with a mouse (using lots of copying/pasting and making mirror images.) You can click this picture to see a bigger version.

Each girl got to decorate her own wand and tiara. I made the wands and bought the tiaras at Joann's Fabrics. -Note Gabriella zooming through the background.

Gabriella had a very methodical approach to tiara decorating... one big gem on each point and eventually she added a big foam star in the middle.

The fruit salad was pretty popular and of course Jonathan had to show off by doing the whole watermelon bowl thing. We also had pasta salad, chicken and... tiara cupcakes.

Tiara cupcakes with skittles for gems was a great idea... I just forgot that I have no skills with icing.

Gabriella painted special goodie bags for each of her friends. I cut a sponge into a tiara stamp and she had a blast mixing up shades of pink a lavender and stamping. As she made each one she would say things like "Iona will love this purple color" or "Grace would like a Sleeping Beauty sticker." We filled each bag with some non-candy princess items. Grace wasn't able to make the party today so we saved her bag for her. (Good thing we still had her bag, because I forget to take pictures before the others got ripped into!)

I have to say that this was probably the calmest preschoolers birthday party I've ever been to. While the girls were decorating tiaras and wands they were concentrating so hard it was nearly silent. They enjoyed quite a bit of dress up and tea party free play, which was also pretty calm. Lunch was full of please and thank yous. Obviously these kids' parents have done something right!

Thank you to all the friends that came to celebrate today! I may post a few pictures of the cuties later, but I need to ask permission from their parents first. So, last, but not least...

Princess Juliana....

The Queen...