A Fancy Tea Party for a Fancy Five Year Old

Evie turned 5 at the end of March!  Can it be???  She's maturing and it's showing and I'm sad about it.

The thing with Evie is that she hasn't really found "her thing" when it comes to characters, shows, activities...she is the 3rd child and absorbs what everyone else does and likes...she rolls with it or else she'll be left out from the older ones...she's ok with everything.  That's a good thing, but it's also a not-so-good thing because when you ask her exactly what kind of birthday party she wants, she wants it all.  She wants a gymnastics party like last year...she wants a Pump It Up party like Eli had...she wants to roll in a giant inflatable hamster ball like Elina's school fundraiser had...she wants to dress up....she wants to incorporate an Easter egg hunt.  It's just a conglomerate of everything she's seen--but not one specific thing she loves and absolutely has to have.  We discussed the party for a few weeks and she finally decided she wanted a dress-up tea party at home with her friends.  She wanted everyone to dress up and she wanted to play a game and she wanted to end with a dance party in the bonus room.  Done!

I was excited about the tea party idea since we had thrown a fairy tea party for Elina when she turned 4.  She invited 6 of her closest friends and they all came dressed up in beautiful dresses.  We actually had 3 Elsas attend the party!  (Needless to say, after the party, Evie wanted her own Elsa dress!)

Here's what the party had--

BUTLERS
Eli and B dressed in their fancy-wear and served the girls at the tea party.  Well, B did most of the serving...Eli was MIA for a little while and then he decided to help himself to a cupcake.  Not super helpful, but he gets points for being super cute. B, too!

EASY DECORATIONS
We made a beautiful, easy backdrop using 3 plastic tablecloths.  We cut the tablecloth into strips and then braided the top part a little so that the colors would fan out more.  It actually came out nicely!

I also made a doily banner (because doilies make everything look fancy) by stringing doilies together and using my new Silhouette Portrait cutter that B got me for Christmas.  This thing is really amazing.  It can cut out any font that you have and it can cut lots of different shapes.  Now I understand why it is such a pricey item...because you don't need to buy a lot of cutouts anymore!

Then of course we used lots of pretty flowers and tiered stands and cake stands to make everything fancy-looking.  J did a great job at staging it all!

FOOD
We had lots of fancy food for the girls--little PBJ sandwiches,

marshmallows decorated with pink sugars,

pink sugar wafers dipped in almond bark and decorated with fun sprinkles,

little "macarons" (melted white chocolate sandwiched between 2 Cookie Crisp cereals!),

watermelon and blueberries inside a watermelon cut into the shape of a tea pot,

and fancy cupcakes (Jewish pound cake with buttercream).

ACTIVITIES

As each girl arrived, Evie put pearl necklaces around their necks.  Then they all decorated tea party hats with fake flowers, little butterflies, and gems.  The girls placed the items and a few adults hot glued them onto the hats.  In retrospect, the gems were a terrible idea.  Definitely took too long to glue those on!  And of course, Evie had to make a whole row of them!!

Then the girls made their own fancy necklaces with candy beads, Fruity Cheerios, and cookie charms (flower shaped cookies that I decorated with royal icing).  The girls worked hard on this...it was so quiet!  It was fun to watch the different ways each girl approached this activity.  Evie strung rainbow patterns.  Another girl did a rainbow, but she put all of the different shades of red together first...then all of the orange shades, etc.  Another girl made her own patterns--red and yellow, red and yellow, red and yellow...then green and orange, green and orange, green and orange...and so on.  They all came out beautifully!

GAME
Then we needed to switch the table decorations from a craft table to a tea party table.  So we had the girls sit on the floor to play Pass the Teacup while a few adults reset the table.  We played princess music and Eli would randomly pause the music and whoever was holding the teacup would be out.  To make it less sad, we told them that if they were "out" then they could come over and pick a prize first.  Evie's excited face during this game was priceless.  Truly priceless.  She told us that this was by far her favorite activity during the entire party!  Wow!  In the end, Evie came in 2nd but it really didn't matter because she had so much fun!  She said that it was difficult to pass the teacup with her big poofy dress on...it was really slippery.  Ha!

TEA PARTY
I told the girls about manners and I told them what "teas" they could choose from--chocolate milk, fruit punch, and apple juice.  Let me just tell you now that if you're thinking about doing a tea party for your little ones, just skip the apple juice.  NO ONE picked it!  Save your juice.  Everyone loved sipping tea from their fancy tea cups!  We actually purchased all the teacups and saucers at Goodwill the week before.  It was lots of fun mixing and matching things.  And now we have lots of items the kids can use for their own tea parties...and I won't be sad if they break.

Evie is being so dainty and proper...

...now look at our girl trying to get the very last drop of fruit punch out!

CAKE
Then we did the cake.  I had a half bundt for Evie to blow the candles out on.  It was also the cake I used to serve the adults.

Then each girl got a cupcake that they could decorate with all kinds of fancy sprinkles and edible pearls.  Evie ALWAYS wants me to buy fancy sprinkles and I don't because I have tons of leftover ones from other occasions, so I figured I'd let her go crazy for her birthday!  She thought it was the most awesome thing to put as much as she wanted of anything on top of her cupcake.  The end result was so pretty!  But then she took one bite, took off all the pink pearls, took a second bite and she was done!  She didn't want to eat it anymore!  It was just too much junk on there!

Here's our dainty girl again...

GIFTS
Evie received lots of wonderful gifts at the party...but the biggest winner were Barbie dolls!  We have lived without Barbies for quite a while now, so this is all new to us.  Previously, I had asked Evie what she truly wanted to see when she ripped open the wrapping paper on her gifts and she enthusiastically yelled out, "BARBIES! LOTS OF BARBIES!"  I was taken aback, but I was also glad she knew exactly what she wanted for once!  I only mentioned Barbies to my sister J...and after her birthday she had 7 Barbie dolls and 2 Frozen Barbie-like dolls!  I was shocked, but Evie was thrilled.

DANCE PARTY
Evie wanted to end her party with a dance/karaoke party in the bonus room so we all went up there and Evie started us all off by singing "Burn' while the other girls danced all around the room.  Then the other girls took turns singing Frozen songs, while everyone else danced around.  It was very entertaining!

It was a really fun party and the time just flew right by.  The girls were all so well-behaved and most of them were on task during the whole party.  Plus, my family was in town to help.  It all went so smoothly.  What a great way to celebrate Evie's 5th birthday!  (We still celebrated Evie's birthday for days after this...but I'll post more on that later.)
Here is our classy 5 year old again...

And here she is being anything but classy while playing Wii...

Gotta love this girl!!