It’s a new year and we still have parties to share from 2021! Let’s start with this adorable one! A few months ago we had the pleasure of planning Eloise’s 5th birthday party. Her mom is a favorite client of...

Jenny Cookies offers custom created dessert tables, wedding cakes, cupcakes, cookies, cake pops, and mini desserts. Display options from vintage to modern...

Don't all things begin with a desperate need to buy themed vintage stamps from an etsy shop???? How could I ever resist? :) It's taken a while to blog Charlie's ninth birthday party because I was waiting until it was featured on Hostess with the Mostess which finally posted on the same day I flew to Boston WITHOUT my laptop! They had told me it would feature at the end of the month so I was not ready or prepared at all for a mid-June feature! And of course, I had to wait an additional five days to get home from B-town to even access my images! Crazy times! :) I started planning Charlie's party back in November. The second Henry's Monster Party wrapped, my talented party-styling girlfriend, Rachel, wanted to know what was next. We asked Charlie to give us a theme to start working on -- and he said "LEGOS!!". That didn't really work for us. There are too many lego parties already out there. It might've taken a little persuasion to get him to decide that what he reeeally wanted was a chemistry party. :) Rachel runs RV Parties with her BFF and partner, Victoria. They design the most adorable printables for pretty much any party theme. You can buy the science printables from this party as well the monster printables from Henry's party -- or a variety of many other themes - HERE at their etsy shop! You'll also see lots of my photography there. I'm their favorite professional photographer. I was seriously & intensely proud of the large chalkboard that we used for our backdrop at the dessert table. I knew two things: 1., there was NO WAY that I could handwrite anything on any chalkboard and have it look adorable - not to mention, I'm way to OCD to have the font on a backdrop not completely match with the party design/font, and 2., I did NOT want to buy a new, giant chalkboard and then have no idea what to do with it when the party wrapped. But, thats why engineering prints from Staples are the greatest thing in the whole wide world. Yes. You heard me. The greatest. If you need something printed in a very large size (this one was 36x48) but don't want to pay your child's college tuition for it - and it happens to be a black and white image - then head to Staples. I had Rachel design a large print to look like a fake chalkboard and had it printed for $6. Then I tacked it to a corkboard that I already had hanging over my desk in my office. Perfect. We had so many amazing treats on our dessert table! Miss Lulu's Sweet Treats sent us the cake pops atoms on a stick. They are the best cake pops I've ever had in my entire life. No joke. I *might* have lied to a couple of the children who asked if they could have one and said they were for display only so there'd be a few leftover. And the chocolate-dipped Oreo Molecules were her idea and I looove how creative and perfectly themed they are! And the amazing Jessica of J&J Bakeshop - local here in VA - provided us with the perfect cookies decorated to look like the element of Charlie!! She is so talented, y'all. I ordered specialty cookies from her for Christmas gifts last year and I encourage you all to find a reason to need cookies just to see what she can do! And I made the cupcakes because I'm a cupcake snob now and can only eat the cake that my BFF, Mandie, makes or the cake my BFF, Mandie, taught me how to make. I was also really proud of my party favor idea! Last summer, I taught Charlie the Mentos + Diet Soda reaction - read about it here - (so many links in this post!!). He loved it so much that I figured it should either be an experiment at the party or the favor! Since it's pretty messy and doesn't take very long to react, I figured, favor it is! I think it's always best to send the messy stuff home to the parents. Just like it's always best to serve the guests all the sugar RIGHT before the end of the party. :) Did you know that lab coats are RIDICULOUSLY expensive?? And that even the costume ones for kids to play doctor and dress up with on Halloween don't even dip below $10 each?? As much as I wanted real lab coats that I'd have embroidered with guest names for the party, that's just plain insane and I could not encourage the market to continue to charge those prices! Harumph!! Instead, I bought the 5-pack of two-sizes-too-large white undershirt tees from Target and cut them up the middle! Voila! Lab coats on the cheap! I did splurge on party color lab goggles for about $3 each. Totally worth it. So cute. And Charlie's adorable science shirt was a custom design by Ella Mella who rocks my world with their awesome kid's fashions. And Henry's shirt was sent to us from Periodically Inspired! I just love how she smooshed periodic table elements together to form geeky-chic words. Henry's my precious little GeNiUS!! And a bit of a camera ham, too! Once the house was decorated and the kids dressed, it was time to paaaaartay! An amazing woman, Calsin, runs a business of bringing science, technology, engineering and mathemathics to parties and playdates and schools, oh my! She. Is. Awesome. She told me that if she didn't have her business, she'd set up a lab in her garage and experiment anyway! I loved it. That's how I feel about my photography. If there wasn't work, there'd STILL be pictures. Her business, STEM-KIDS, is such a great concept. Learning can be a BLAST (literally!) and parties don't have to lack brain power, either! Calsin can tailor the experiments for any party. I didn't want the party to cross sciences (OCD, much?) so everything had to stay in a "chemistry" theme. Duh. And, the experiments also needed to entertain eight very active nine year olds. Calsin knew just what to do -- MESSY, hands-on chemical reactions that would result in slime, exploding "elephant toothpaste" and a giant bowl full of smoky, bubbly dry ice! EXPERIMENT #1: SLIME The kids loved this. Calsin set up a table full of the necessary ingredients and as the kids started to mix everything together, it started forming ooey-gooey slime! After they finished squishing it in their fingers, we packed up their custom-colored slime in take home bags! EXPERIMENT #2: ELEPHANT TOOTHPASTE Whats better than seeing foamy goo grow and grow and grow, so much so that it spills up and out of a bottle and into a tray for you to play with it!? NOTHING! Birthday boy was the first one to pour in the special ingredient to make the chemical reaction activate! He was SO excited!! And, um, he's also incredibly cute. EXPERIMENT #3: SUBLIMATION DEMONSTRATION I'm a creative. I photograph things. I can write fairly well. And I daydream great things. I enjoy and am awed by science but, I am no scientist. So, I have to admit that when Calsin said we'd do a "sublimation demonstration", I just blindly nodded my head like I had a clue what she was talking about. Google and Wikipedia say that sublimation is "the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase." So, why the dry ice turned into a smoky gas without any water sneaking in between those phases, all makes sense now. (Can you tell I was concentrating on proper exposure and focus while she was explaining all of this to the kiddos???) Oy. Adding in some dish washing liquid will create a giant bubble that will enclose the smoke inside of it and when it pops, the smoke explodes out! It's really fun and the kids obviously LOVED getting the chance to be the one to pop the bubble! And then it was time to blow out the candles and for me to cry the weepy mama-cry because my baaaaaaby is NINE!!! See the party with all our vendor info plus more of my wit and charm in describing the details (and more pictures!!) on the fabulous and well-followed Hostess with the Mostess blog HERE.

MAD HATTIES TEA PARTY

Here at HOORAY!, we love a party that stands out from the crowd, which is why when we caught wind of the mermaid party trend we couldn’t help but get excited. Full of shimmer and sparkle, a mermaid party is an underwater adventure you, your little one and all their friends will love to be

Fairy bread is an easy food that can be prepared for a kid’s party. It is incredibly easy to organize, the kids love it, and it will be a hit party food. This is a total win win when it comes to catering for children’s birthday parties.

A Science Birthday Party with Periodic Table of Elements style desserts, DIY test tube piñata, Mentos & Coke, Dry Ice bubbles + a build your own molecule activity

This cute Frozen theme veggie tray is sure to be a hit at your next event!

Little G turned five this summer. Five!! She love, love, loves rainbows, so I thought what better way to celebrate her 5th birthday than by having a rainbow birthday party! So I sat down with her and talked to her about her birthday party, and when I mentioned the idea of a rainbow theme, her face lit up with excitement. At that moment, I knew it was a go. I started brainstorming and scouring the internet for ideas, then got right to work. First on the agenda: rainbow party invites. I decided to design these myself and was really happy with how they came out. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I finally decided on the wording "Please join us for a rainbow of fun as we celebrate Gretchen's birthday!", the letters all being in rainbow colors, of course. I initially had it with a white background, but it still seemed a little blah, so I added a blue sky background with a fluffy white cloud. So that's the front: On the inside is a big colorful rainbow with all of the details of the party: Next up: the rainbow party decorations. I wanted to keep the decorations fairly simple and inexpensive, so we started out making some paper rainbows. Very easy to do...all you need is some paper or card stock in all the rainbow colors, something to cut it with (I used a paper cutter so that my strips would be nice and straight), and a stapler. When we were making these, I was planning to stick with the traditional ROY G BIV color scheme, but G thought there should be pink in the rainbows, so we added that. She also took a great interest in the color indigo...she was very intrigued by this new color that she had never heard of! On party day, we ended up putting these on a table inside with the rainbow sticker books (more on this in a bit!) and some rainbow roses (yes, they are real, and yes, they are dyed): Crepe paper streamers are also an inexpensive and easy way to make a party feel festive. Since this was a rainbow party, I picked up rolls in all of the rainbow colors (even indigo!!). On party day, I hung a few streamers on the front porch so that our guests could easily spot the party house, then I hung them all along the ceiling creating a path from the front door, down the hall, to the kitchen, then split them so that half led to the back door (most of the party was in the back yard), and the other half led to the playroom (which, by the way, is not yet 100% done, but I did at least get the rainbow finished before the party...pics soon!!). Here's a couple pics of the streamers: So that's the decorations. Now for the rainbow party food! If you've looked for rainbow party ideas on the internet, you will likely have come across all sorts of dyed food concoctions to make rainbow food. But since all of the colors of the rainbow can be found in food naturally, I don't see the need to make all of these dyed rainbow food-like things. I kept it simple with fruit skewers, a veggie tray, and bags of rainbow goldfish crackers (made with natural dyes...yay!). Here's the food table: Ooooh, pretty! I couldn't have been happier with house this turned out. I really didn't have a plan ahead of time of how I was going to set the food table up, but I was thrilled when I saw in the forecast that the weather was going to be nice and we could have most of the party outside! So I popped up a folding table, threw a cheap white table cloth on it, then ran more of those rainbow streamers (those big rolls of streamers really keep going and going!) across the top and down the sides. Veggies were layed out in rainbow stripes: grape tomatoes, baby carrots, yellow bell peppers, cucumbers, blue corn chips (closest I could get to a blue veggie!), and purple cauliflower, with bowl of ranch dip (kind of like a cloud!): Rainbow fruit skewers with watermelon, oranges, pineapple, kiwi, blueberries, and grapes. These were a big hit! Almost all of them were eaten by the time the party ended: You may have noticed a rainbow at the back of the food table (no, not the one hanging on the fence...we'll get to that in a minute). This one is a rainbow of flowers! My mom knew we were having a rainbow party for G's birthday, and put in a special request with her favorite florist (that would be me!) for some rainbow flowers for the birthday girl. So I came up with this: Birthday girl loved it, and our party guests did too! So rainbow invites, rainbow decorations, rainbow food, rainbow flowers...how about some rainbow fun?? For birthday parties, I like to have at least one or two games or activities lined up...gives the kids something to do and makes it feel like a party. With the rainbow theme, I thought a scavenger hunt would be perfect! Since kids usually love stickers, I decided to go with a rainbow sticker scavenger hunt. So I made sticker books for all of the kids, with a page for each color of the rainbow: I got lucky and found some great deals on stickers in rainbow colors (thank you Target dollar spot and Christmas Tree Shops!), which I cut apart and divided into each color of the rainbow (except indigo, much to G's dismay). Each color was put in a bowl with a little sign: I hid these bowls of stickers all around the house. Initially I was going to make up clues to lead from one color to the next, but decided to nix it due to time constraints and also the fact that it wasn't really necessary for this age group to have fun with the hunt. The kids loved this, and every one of them found all of the colors! Now for that other rainbow you saw hanging on the fence. This one was for the Rainbow Limbo! G was so excited about doing the Rainbow Limbo at her party. I had planned to do something more elaborate for the rainbow (I had visions of clear tubing filled with colored water so the light would shine through the colors). In the end, I went with something much simpler, but still totally effective. And since I already had plenty of streamers in all the rainbow colors, I figured I may as well use those: The kids had a blast doing this! After we had gone from high to low, G wanted to go from low to high, so we went with it. And after that, it seemed like the kids still wanted to play, so I figured why not milk it for all it's worth? I gave the kids a series of things to do going under the Rainbow Limbo, like "hop on one foot", "tip toe", and "hop like a bunny". Then I had G be the leader, and everyone had to follow her, copying her movements. Fun stuff!! Now for the cake. The rainbow cake. I performed several experiments to make a rainbow layer cake with natural food dyes and got mixed results. I thought I had all of the colors down, but I was a bit disappointed when baking the final cake that the orange layer did not turn out as it had previously, and the red/pink layer was not as vibrant as I had hoped. But overall, you got the idea. And not a drop of food coloring in it, so I can at least be proud of that! And now finally, the rainbow party favors. I had so much fun with these! G helped pick out the favors, and everything had to be rainbow, of course. We packaged everything in cellophane bags, tied at the top with curling ribbon in rainbow colors, and attached a tag that said "rainbow to go!": Here's a peek at all of the fun rainbow goodies inside the bags: clockwise from top left: rainbow pencils (oriental trading co.) with hand sewn felt cloud toppers (me!), rainbow stickers (target), rainbow notepads (oriental trading co.), rainbow paint pots and brushes (ac moore), rainbow slap bracelets (oriental trading co.), bubble jars (oriental trading co.) with rainbow labels (me!), and rainbow crayons (oriental trading co.) And that about sums up the Rainbow Birthday Party. Yes, a lot of planning and effort went into it, but in the end when I asked G what her favorite part of the party was and she replied, "Everything! The whole day!", it was all well worth it. A smashing success! Here's one last photo of the birthday girl with one of her rainbow roses (you can almost see her rainbow nail polish...)

Cake carved and covered with sugarpaste. Runout body directly on the cake. Numbers, letters and details painted and/or run out separately.

How to host a royally fun princesses & knights themed birthday party with a punny invitation, DIY castle backdrop, a golden birthday banner, creative activities for kids of all ages & party favors galore! Party Theme As we left Raina’s “princesses & knights” themed birthday party this March, Juniper leaned over to me and said,...

Can you dig it? Owen's dinosaur fossil party for his 5th birthday was a prehistoric event filled with bright and colorful decorations.

Liesl absolutely LOVES animals, so we decided that a Wild African Safari would be the perfect theme for her 5th birthday. Her only request was "live animals", and we found a great non-profit to give the party goers a fun and and education exotic animal show and Liesl was their special assistant.

Here is another really easy way to take up space and decorate for VBS! The kids will really enjoy these! Take a couple of boxes and wrap them in brown paper. Write things on them in black marker …

Recently, we threw my 3-year-old a Troll-tastic birthday party, full of lots of DIY fun. One of my favorite birthday party projects is making custom piñatas. They're easy to put together using recycled materials. Plus, using leftover packing supplies means they're inexpensive too! Find out how to make a DIY Trolls piñata! This

Everything down to the food was rainbow themed. Here's how I did it. The decorations for this rainbow themed party were ridiculously easy...

Today we have 10 Magnificent Moana Crafts which will be loved as much as the movie. The movie Moana has been popular for a while now but the Moana craze is still going strong! We are off to a Moana disco next week so I have been thinking about costumes and other fun Moana crafts to

How to make No Sew Mermaid Tails. Easy DIY Craft for a Little Mermaid Party or homemade Halloween Costume.