Party Retrospective

So we celebrated Alyssa's seventh birthday last Saturday. Planning the party nearly killed me. Definitely killed my credit card. 

 

I was up late Friday night making truffles. Baking and decorating cookies. Drinking Fuzzy Navels. You know. Like most aunts do the night before their niece's birthday party.

 

Sis1 and Emmy came over Friday night and Sis1 spent the night at my house which was great because...Help! haha

 

So the party...

I got up super early and went to Sis2's to help decorate. I'd planned on leaving work early to go help Friday afternoon but her MIL came over so I was told to just wait. (Her MIL is vile.) So up early Saturday morning.

Lyssa, bless her heart pitched in. How amazing is it that she's old enough to run the vacuume?

And sweep? Kinda a little Cinderella moment there. Which is funny because she's wearing an Ariel nightgown while cleaning for her Frozen birthday party.
 

Witness the transformation. It's Elsa!

 

 

They found the dress on Ebay. Apparently there's a guy on there who makes them and sells them for not an astronomical price. Emmy did her hair in an attempt to replicate Elsa's long pretty white braid.

 

Meanwhile, I hung out with Olaf!

The cake, m'dears was inspired by a cake we saw on the interwebs  and spent a butt-ton of money to replicate. Rock candy sticks, a wedding cake staircase, waffle cone trees and figurines of the characters on a sheetcake topped with a six inch round cake. Mama did all the really hard stuff like baking and frosting. I put the tall rock candy sticks together (two sticks stacked and wired to skewers)in the back and helped her figure out how to make the waffle cone trees taller. (stacking one on top of each other, in case you needed to know.)

It was not without it's share of difficulty. Transporting a cake in August heat--even with the A/C blasting--is just a melted corner of frosting disaster waiting to happen.

But it did NOT disappoint.
 

 

There were games. The most popular was "pin the nose on Olaf." Goofus had a larger photo of Olaf printed off and Sis2 cut out carrot shaped pieces of orange construction paper. All the littles thought it was just the bees knees that the teenager played with them.

 

 

 

I did manage a little photo op with the ice queen. She was gracious enough not to freeze my heart and she's definitely worth melting for. And worth the exhaustion. :-)

 

She wracked up on presents and lemme tell ya. Her friends give good gift.

 

The photo below is of the grin I got when she read the card I gave her. Not because it had money in it but because I had quoted Olaf. One of my favorite quotes from the movie: "Head's up! Watch out for my butt!"

 

This girl hung out with me in the kitchen when all the noise and bodies started to get to me. She's so sweet.

 

This boy is a kid after my own heart. He and I both needed periodic breaks from all the chaos. So of course he was in the kitchen with me. He also sought me out several other times just to climb in my lap and get a reassuring hug when it all got to him. Just little mini time-outs from all the fun. He's my little introvert buddy. haha

This girl, on the other hand, she was in the thick of it all day long. She's a little social butterfly like her Nana. A pretty truffle eating social butterfly. ;-)

We had Cheetos, strawberries, truffles, marshmallows and cookies. Oh! And carrots for Sven. We couldn't forget Sven.
 

The table set up in the dining room. The swag around the window is tulle studded with snowflake cutouts on blue glitter paper (my Wednesday night activity) and the snowflakes in the center are a cardboard mobile I got off Amazon and conned Goofus into hanging from the chandelier.
 

As worn out as we all were....as crazy it as it all was, the girl had a wonderful time and that's all that really counts.