Tea-rrific Birthday

Hello friends. Last week was not ideal. Two snowdays, lice, frozen then busted pipes, double vision issues and the worst TMJ I’ve ever had (probably from stress?!) Good news is, it’s a whole new week! I know a lot of you had it far worse with no power and heat for weeks! Much more stressful. So I really can’t compare but it was not a great week for me.

This weekend we are visiting my brother and sister in law and finally seeing their (not so) new house that they bought 2 years ago! The kids are excited to see their cousins and because of postponement due to weather across the South a couple weeks back we even get to be there for Ari’s birthday party. We are looking forward to it.

Speaking of birthdays I realized I didn’t even show you Patricia’s party! Patricia asked for an “animal tea party” this year and as you know I’m rather a tea party afficionado so I didn’t need to do much to make that happen. Because she wanted to invite her whole class (20 kids) plus a couple others and I knew parents would ask to bring siblings, I rented out the community center cafe for the party! It worked great.

This is the one party where I did not have too many crafts, in fact I ran out of crafts. It is so kid dependent how long they spend on something that I totally stand by my usual inclination to have twice as many activities than they need. Luckily it was unseasonably warm out and my mom suggested we play some outdoor games with the kids like farmer and the dell and what time is it Mr fox. They seemed to enjoy that.

Theme & Invites

I don’t know the emails of most of the people in Patricia’s class so I did old fashioned paper invites! I made these on MS Word… they did the trick.

Decor

From past parties, you’ll know I have a collection of tea cups. I added a few more this time around from the thrift shop, and also bought a bunch of pretty plates that I turned into tea party tiered trays for cheap! I wanted there to be one per table, and ended up with a few extras that I used for cupcakes. I bought sheets from the thrift store that I turned into tablecloths and splurged on some paper plates from Michaels that look like real china. But the real pièce de résistance? A streamer chandelier that covered the ceiling and had a (I know I went against my rules) golden 5 balloon. Will gets full credit for putting that up exactly to spec. I never would have been able to reach the ceiling and he did a marvelous job.

Activities

I bought these cute little “aqua puff” animals. Basically they are dry flattened sponges you color with marker and then paint with water to get them to puff up. I figured it would be a good activity as kids arrived. Unfortunately kids arrived in varying amounts of time and some kids took wildly varying amounts of time to make them.

Next I bought a bunch of mini wild animal stuffies (made from 100% recycled materials). I made adoption certificates and little bow ties and hair bows for them to decorate then with as well as little capes for them to decorate and put on. Again, varying amounts of time for these.

Finally I had kids make tea party hats by picking out flowers and bows to put on their hats. I helped them with the bows, they decorated with the flowers using tacky glue and then my mom glued them all down for the kids with hot glue. This worked well and most kids’ hats stayed together!

High Tea

After this we had the actual tea party, described below. All the kids liked the tea choices I picked with many asking for seconds.

Games

After lunch we went outside for a few games, and then back inside for cupcakes and singing.

Food

We had a couple kids with different food allergies so I did not put any questionable items with allergens on the tables with the kids (honestly I wasn’t even going to serve anything with any known allergens but my friend, whose child has an egg allergy, convinced me she wanted to eat egg salad so I made an exception… Plus it’s Patricia’s favorite). Frustratingly some parents didn’t tell me their kids had food allergies (partially my fault because I usually put it on the invite and didn’t this time). Luckily it was an allergy I had accommodated for as a “just in case” (and I’d taken pictures of the things I had purchased instead of making from scratch so the parent could double check). As for food prep, I brought a toaster oven to heat up the crumpets but everything else was prepared in the morning and put in the fridge until we served it. The labels made it easy to remember where everything should go.

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