Party Time. Excellent!

When J and I got hitched, I planned the wedding myself. With help from my mom, my sister, and J's mom, I did everything from making each invitation, program, and table card by hand (decorating each one), to fashioning hanging tea lights and hooking them up in the trees, to making shirts and jewelry for the wedding party and sewing flower petals into my little sister's dress. I made it even more work than a wedding usually is. And I LOVED it.
I listen as sympathetically as possible to friends complain about the annoyances of wedding planning. Who has time to spend a whole day comparing napkin colors?! So true. But I love this stuff. Napkin colors! Place cards! Party favors! Yes please! I ended up doing party and event planning as a side job in college, more for the fun than the cash.
Parties indulge all my type A tendencies to the extreme. Planning, organizing, making lists, arranging and re-arranging things... cleaning the heck out of everything before and after....it's like zen. There can be themes people! Which also indulges what little creativity I have. I love to come up with ideas and see them through with my own hands. I don't get a ton of opportunities to employ this obsession. BUT! Little One does have birthdays. And kid's events are by far the most fun. I tried to keep it simple, even though there was a theme. Oooh. I didn't have to think hard to choose one; Little One pretty much chose for me.
Her big obsession now (besides Beyonce- another post altogether) is tea parties. Not the war paint/picket sign type, Peanuts, even if we do live in DC. I mean the big hat, china saucer, one-lump-or-two type. Awhile back I got Her a thrift store tea set, and it has been all tea parties, all the time, ever since.
So for Her birthday, I made little appetizers and tiny sandwiches, and an awful lot of sweet stuff.

Including these ice cream cones, cut down and iced to cookies to look like tea cups. They were kind of boring so I added some color and sprinkles. (Yes I did. Me, who has serious qualms about giving sugar to children. But....they were kind of cute, right? What's a few cavities here and there? Ahem).










J's awesome aunt did this amazing cake, which was as yummy as it was pretty.




I made a tea-pot pinata, inspired by Ellie, the Duchess of crafting.

It was the pinata that would not die.

Little One and I wanted the kids to indulge their crafty selves too. So we picked out plain cups and fancy saucers for them to decorate with paint pens.












And what's a tea party without dressing up? So there were hats for them to decorate; straw hats for the girls and top hats for the boys.








To get extra fancy, the little ladies had plastic necklaces and I made sparkly clip-on bow-ties for the gents.



It was really fun seeing how much the kids liked these projects. Especially the older neighborhood boys, who are generally too street to be seen doing anything that does not impersonate a teenager. I loved seeing one 9 year-old, in a plastic top-hat and sparkly bow-tie, painting his name on a tea cup and muttering, "ya'll better not try and tell anyone I'm doing this..." and then adding glitter. Glitter! He could just not help himself. Really, Peanuts, with glitter and stickers, who could?










I set up the deck with some little tables and tea sets for the kids to play at, and I was also surprised to see how much they got into that part. I knew that Little One would love it, but it was nice to see the other kiddos pouring pretend tea and bringing a cup of air to their mammas.












We had fun. Not least, Little One.


I wish you could have seen Her face the moment She came downstairs from Her nap to find the house transformed into Tea Party central. Or heard how She whispered "Tea Party!" in this excited, awestruck voice, and touched each little tea cup so admiringly before dissolving into giggles. It was magic.

She was thrilled to see a whole table of food that She could eat ALL of. And She spent most of the party eating something. She kept going back to choose more.








She was the first one to start singing "happy birthday" when the candles came out.

She had Her first ever real sugary treat. An egg/milk/soy free cupcake and icing that turned out pretty tasty! I used this recipe, substituting coconut milk for the shortening, and also made little muffins out of this one, which were yummy enough to make again, for all of us.


My friend A is an amazing photographer and artist, and as part of Little One's present she shot some pictures for us. I am too lazy to figure out how to make the files smaller to post many of them here, but they are really lovely.



How much girlier can you get...a tiara and a party hat? Little One was in Her element.

And, throughout the whole thing- and as I scrubbed every puzzle piece, every wooden block, every inch of the house until 2:30 the next morning to make sure it was allergy-sanitized by the time She woke up- so was I.
Little One takes after Her dad in a lot of ways, and She is nothing but Her own Self in others. But in some ways, She's like Her mom. One thing we definitely agree on is that there there isn't much that's more fun than being a hostess, making things from scratch, and, most of all, having great friends to share it with.