Easter Weekend 2014

This weekend was packed full.  On Saturday, I took Bean and a couple of her cousins to our church's egg hunt.  It rained most of the day and I was afraid it would mean the egg hunt was cancelled but the great folks at our church moved the egg hunt inside and had plenty of games and crafts to keep everyone happy.

Egg coloring.

Face painting.

Games.

Once the egg hunt was over, the girls inspected their baskets.

Sunday morning, Bean found her present from the Easter Bunny.

That afternoon we joined my husband's family for Easter dinner and another egg hunt.

Bean and her cousins loved hunting for the eggs.  Bean won first place in her age group.

After the hunt, Bean posed for some photos.  She picked out her own dress this year.

I asked her to pose for me and this is what I got.  I have no idea who taught her this.

All in all we had a very Hoppy Easter.  (Bean loves that joke!)

Bean's Sofia the First Birthday Party

 Bean wanted to have a Sofia the First birthday party this year. We knew of a local bakery that does birthday parties but we could not arrange a date that would work so on a suggestion by a co-worker we decided to do our own bakery party. This is where my fellow bloggers come in. So many bloggers are so generous to share their own projects and ideas and this year it really helped us with our party. I stole copied borrowed many great ideas found on Pinterest and through the magic of Google!

Going with the Sofia the First theme, I started looking around for invitation ideas.  I found a  a ton of Sofia party ideas at 3 Little Greenwoods.  I wish I could say I was also able to keep my party costs at $75 like she did but I couldn't.  Using the wonderful free Sofia the First party printables shared by Peonies and and Poppy Seeds, I made similar invites using ribbon I already had on hand.  I only had to purchase the sparkly cardstock for the backing paper of our invites and more envelopes.  Using a great coupon at Michael's,  I was able to put together our invitations for $9.

 I also used the foldable place cards to label our drink station and activities.  You can see one I made to display the Amulets of Avalor that I made after finding this great tutorial from Handmade Happy Hour.  I actually won a Mod Podge contest awhile back and it contained some of these Mod Podge Podgeable Shapes and some Mod Podge with glitter.  I had to purchase the gems for $2.34 at Hobby Lobby but I was able to use ribbon I already had on hand.

 The Welcome sign came from this set of free printables by Seven Thirty Three.  I wanted to make the welcome sign a little prettier but ran out of time so it got slapped onto a blank canvas with some glue dots.

Bean's cake was made by a wonderful lady named Bonnie who runs Bonnie's Cakes.  I found her through a fellow mom friend and come to find out after the party that Bonnie is friends with our aunt.  It's a small world!

 

We served "pink tea" a/k/a strawberry lemonade and water.  No food though.  Just cake and ice cream.

I don't have a picture of them but I used my Silhouette and cut out pink and purple tiaras that went on the water bottles.  I stole borrowed this idea from Catch My Party.  I found an idea on Etsy of dressing up plastic goblets for the pink tea.  Bean put Sofia stickers on each one and I tied the little bows.


After my friend suggested we do our own bakery party, I started looking for ideas on how to do this without it becoming some big huge mess.  We bought two jumbo muffin pans at Target and made our mini cakes the morning of the party.  Word of advice to anyone considering your own bakery birthday party - go to your grocery store bakery and ask if they will sell you some un-iced cupcakes instead.  We were afraid we hadn't made enough so Hubz went to our local Publix and was able to buy six for $2.50.  If I had known that beforehand I could have saved a lot of time and effort.

I found these cute cupcake boxes marked down at Five Below - $4 for a pack of 3.  I bought the cake decorations at Kroger, Target and Jo-Ann's.  On Pinterest, I stumbled across the idea for using paint palettes to hold the cake and the decorations.  Each princess got their own so there was little mess and no fighting over decorations.

 As you can see Princess Bean really enjoyed decorating her cake.

 I loved these floral arrangements found on Pinterest so I made my own version.  I painted the inside of some of Hubz' mason jars and made rolled felt flowers.  I will have a tutorial on how I made these shortly.

The princesses made princess bookmarks and colored princess posters I found at ConsumerCrafts.com.  The princesses got to take home their cake creation, and the bookmarks and posters.  These all served as the "goody bag".

I used the "Now We Are Six" sign that I made earlier to decorate the gift table.

 This was a totally fun party!  I think all of the little princesses enjoyed it.  I need to thank the beautiful Princess Hannah for helping me keep all of the royal guests entertained that day, Princess Melanie for helping me find the location and set everything up the night before and with the dreaded clean-up after, and also a thanks to Princesses Kimberly, Ashley and Justina for chipping in, too.  And of course King Hubz for all his manual labor.  You all helped to make Bean's 6th Birthday the best!

I'm linking up to the following parties:

A Creative Princess
Rhinestone Beagle
Glued to My Crafts
Artsy Fartsy Mama
Sweet Haute
Craftionary
Make It and Love It



 

Peppermint Candy Cane Playdough Gifts

Peppermint Candy Cane Playdough

We made some peppermint candy cane playdough gifts for Bean's classmates. I followed this recipe shared byCribWithAView.com.

Making play dough is relatively easy and almost pain free.  It can get a bit messy especially when once again someone forgets to add the red food coloring into the batch or tries to add it in later and then shoves their hands right in to start kneading.  If you happen to do that, do not be alarmed by the sight of your hands later on.  Those really are not third degree burns.  It's  just food coloring and it will eventually wear off.

I used the Avery.com Design and Print Online site to make these really cute labels.  If you would like to use these, click here for a free printable.


We used Glad containers and added the labels to the top.

One down, 87,934 more to go!

Christmas Lunchbox Notes

Christmas Lunchbox Notes

I love putting notes in Bean's lunchbox each day. I tried my hand at making a Christmas set myself. This was my first attempt but hopefully they are useable. I print mine out on cardstock. I will update this post with the kits I used.

Just click here to download the lunchbox notes.