Fairy Plans

Elina loves Tinkerbell and she refers to all birthday parties as tea parties. So it just made sense that her birthday party this year was a fairy tea party. We all remember Elina's big hula bash last year...parents, siblings, and family friends all attended. It was quite the event! But alas, I don't have the energy to do big parties every year, so we decided to only invite 4 of Elina's girl friends (no parents allowed) and to have them come dressed up as fairies. We didn't invite boys because of the fairy theme...not sure it would go over well with the boys (although B pointed out that there are boy fairies in the movie Tinkerbell...still).

For the invitations I put together some cute fairy tea party wording from other people and printed it on a big teapot cutout. Then I cut out fairy silhouettes and glued them onto popsicle sticks. Elina used glitter glue to decorate them. She loved doing this part. These were little puppets for each of the girls to keep. I cut a slit into the top of the teapot and stuck the puppets in there. They turned out pretty cute.

The party itself was such a fun experience. The girls were so cute in their outfits and they were so well-behaved. It was amazing. Not to say that I wasn't stressed out the week leading up to the party, but I honestly think I'm going to try my best to host small parties from now on. Luckily, B took the day off so he could attend to Eli and J came down from Austin to help me out.

The night before we were up until 2:30am decorating and doing prep work. We had a whole list of things to get done. We--

• decorated a special birthday chair for Elina to sit in.
• decorated the doorway with lots of streamers.
• got games ready.
• decorated the dining room so it looked like a little fairy land.
• decorated petit fors (tiny cakes).

The decorations were fun to do. We switched out our adult-sized dining table for a smaller coffee table for the kids to sit at. Then we attached strips of pink and white tulle to our dining room lights, draped them down, and pinned them to the wall. We also attached some Tinkerbell pictures and little butterflies to the tulle. It was all very dreamy.

The things that took us the most amount of time were the petit fors. They were a nightmare to decorate. It was all supposed to be easy...at least in my mind it was easy. We just cut out 1-inch cubes of pound cake (yum!), make a glaze, and then spoon the glaze over the cubes so that the glaze covers the entire cube. Totally did not happen like that! Cutting the cake and making the glaze were easy, but getting the glaze to cover the cubes was not. I'm no pastry chef and I must just be really bad at it, but we could NOT get the glaze to run down the cubes right. We had to put a lot of the glaze on it to get it to cover the entire cube. It was exhausting. After J, B, and I each tried our hand at glazing one cube, we gave up. We copped out and dyed some Duncan Hines vanilla frosting and iced the cubes that way. We figured the girls are 4 and to them cake is cake. In the end, they turned out pretty anyway. (Actually, the petit fors ended up tasting really good with the homemade glaze, but it just wasn't worth the effort. And the petit for that B decorated came out the best of the 3. Maybe pastries should have been B's calling?)
On the morning of the party, J and I were busy cutting cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into cute shapes--butterflies, stars, hearts, flowers. We made pink lemonade for our "pink tea." B was in charge of picking up a few things at the store, where he was also supposed to pick up Elina's balloons. B arrived home with the groceries, but no balloons! So he drove back to get the balloons. Then he left the house to have lunch with Eli when the party started. Of course, he left the house with the balloons in the trunk! B came back for the second half of the party, so the balloons eventually made it.
Soooooo....all of this was just the prep work for the party. I'm chuckling as I write this post because I had wanted to keep the party simple this year. It doesn't sound simple though, does it?? But seriously, after you read the party post, you'll see that it was worth it. Well, at least that's my hope.