wordless wednesday- some days it’s just too hot to eat our veggies, so instead we drink them

Ohdeedoh!

Ohdeedoh featured Greta’s Alice in Wonderland Party today! It’s pretty exciting to see all my the work and effort appreciated. You can see their post here.

 

Alice in Wonderland Tea Party

This is going to be a lengthy post. So brace yourselves. As I’ve mentioned before we do preschool graduation big in this house. And my last preschool graduate would be no exception. In fact, this party was originally planned for spring time but then I couldn’t get my act together in time, so we turned it into a little graduation celebration. I decided to do a much smaller party this time than I’ve done for the boys in the past. However, I think it was 10 times as much work. But totally worth it. Since I started planning it for April, I began slowly acquiring all the items. Pretty much I have lived, eaten, and breathed this party for 4 months.

Jane is my go to invitation person. She is ridiculously talented and my vision is penned to paper perfectly. She came up with the most adorable invitations for this sweet party. The photo is blurry, I took it at night time. But you can see how utterly adorable it is.

In fact, the entire week before the party was spent every single day doing things revolving around it. Whether it was an afternoon at the party goods store picking out favors and paper goods, or a day putting all the gift bags together, or shopping for lanterns, or sewing the playing cards banner, or traveling to kinko’s to get the game board made, or shopping for and cooking all the food. This was the first time I cooked everything myself. I might add it also was the first time I baked cupcakes! I know. Unreal. But we aren’t huge cupcake eaters, and in the past I’ve bought our cupcakes at bakeries.

For the adults I served turkey sandwiches, sangria, the black bean and corn salsa that has become a staple in this house, fruit salad, and sparkling waters. The kiddies had sunflower seed butter (since I am too paranoid for kiddies and nut allergies) and honey sandwiches, string cheese, fruit salad, goldfish, and cupcakes.  I also made a sparkling ‘mocktail’ for them from perrier and grapefruit juice.

The girls were directed by this sign to enter through our side gate to come to the backyard.

Once they came through the backyard we had little coloring pages I printed out with Alice in Wonderland figures on them, and then when all the girls arrived we began painting little tea cups and saucer planters. The tea cups are from Oriental Trading Co., and the paints are just acrylics from our local Blick Art store.

My sweet Alice’s costume was bought on our last trip to Disneyland.

For snacks while we were outside painting, the girls had water boxes from Amazon, and popcorn from our popcorn machine.

Once the painting was completed the girls cleaned up and our special surprise guest arrived. I hired an Alice in Wonderland character to come and attend the tea party. She walked through to the backyard and then all the girls followed her inside to see the table and find their seating assignment.

Lanterns are from Pier 1. The table setting is a paper table cloth from Party City and down the center I layered wrapping paper in the polka pattern for some fun contrast. Paper goods are also from Party City. I already owned all the platters. I purchased the clear dispenser for the drink with a chalkboard label from Pier 1. The glass drink bottles I ordered from Specialty Bottle Co., I ordered a lot and will use them for future parties.

My mom found the waffle cones where I placed the girls’ fruit salad at Gelson’s. And the goldfish was served in cupcake liners.

Alice helped serve all the girls their snacks and then read to them the story of Alice in Wonderland.

Once everyone was fed, Alice did face painting for all the girls, and then we played Pin the Grin on the Cheshire Cat. I searched for days for some kind of game or download for this and finally stumbled upon one on Etsy. I took the download and then printed it on glossy thick card stock and then mounted it on a larger board with japanese masking tape.

The morning of the party I sewed together a little banner of playing cards for some more decoration near the game.

The girls absolutely loved the game and kept doing it over and over again. And that was my sweet Alice’s party.

I really tried to multitask at the party as mama, host, photographer, and videographer. But these are all the photos I have, and the video is pretty short but it’s sweet. To watch it you’ll have to click on the post if you are using Google Reader.

Enjoy

Gift bags

Greta and I had a lot of fun putting together these little favors for the girls. I also used them as place settings for the tea table. The theme of the party was Alice in Wonderland and we ended up after illness and scheduling conflicts with 6 little girls (7 including Greta). Which was a nice number because I could really make each little setting something special. Here is what was in the little gift pails with links after the photo.

The pails were from Target, and the following items can be found at :

chinese toy- Party City or your local party store

deck of playing cards- Oriental Trading Company 

Alice in Wonderland book- Scholastic Book Store

Bubbles- Target

Polka Dot straw- Etsy

Twig Crayons- Acme Party Box

Rock Candy and Bubble Gum- Party City

Lipstick Lollipop- Bake it Pretty

Eat Me tag- Bake it Pretty

sunday edition

We are so happy all of our east coast friends and family are fine and the hurricane didn’t meet expectations. Over here it’s been hot, hot hot. We spent the weekend doing a whole lot of work. Not work work, well, except Aaron worked all Friday evening. But actual unpaid work for the most part. We got a whole lot of house projects completed. Although I wish I could report that the inside of my home had the same attention as the outside, but that didn’t quite happen.

Aaron worked on Saturday at the renovation of our local Kingdom Hall. He always ends up with the really hard manual labor work. But secretly he loves it. I think he will be quite sad as soon as he is too old to handle the jack hammer. All I had to do was bake for the crew’s breakfast. Easy peasy. The kids and I spent the day working outside. They took turns helping me paint the adirondack chairs that seem like the never ending project. But alas, I finished the last chair today. They played outside almost the entire day, and then after lunch I decided to blow up several dozen water balloons to cool them off. That turned into a water squirter fight as soon as the balloons were used up, which then turned into a water bowl throwing fight as soon as the squirters broke, which then just turned into hosing each other down.

I did manage to sneak off to see Crazy Stupid Love, which was great. I am a huge Ryan Gosling fan, and that guy can really play any character. Sunday we took a family field trip to Home Depot. Does everyone get as excited as I get when they go there? The possibilities are endless! We picked up the supplies to finish our outdoor lounge/firepit area. And I’m thrilled to report it’s complete. We spent the afternoon on that project, with me painting the final chair while Aaron did the fire pit while the kids created elaborate train systems on the ground around us. This evening Aaron and I are off to a dinner for The City School. We have our final week of summer this week and I’m cringing just thinking of sending them all back. We are going to make the most out of the time left. Pictures to follow some time later this week. And I promise to post photos of a very very cute Alice in Wonderland Tea Party Ms. Greta had.

 

happy friday

This week has been spent spoiling my girl and doing special things with her. I am trying to prepare myself mentally for the start of Kindergarten in a week and a half, but not too sure how well that’s going.

I thought I could kick off your weekend with a smile. Check out Sawyer and Greta’s dance moves in this video. Sawyer definitely chose hip hop with some running man, robot and snake, while Greta I believe was channeling some interpretive dance. Enjoy.

hawaii day eight

Our final day in Paradise we asked the kids what they wanted to do, and they responded with “go to a new beach”. So we obliged. We went to a popular snorkeling beach and spent half of the day swimming and boogie boarding and searching for crabs.

Every afternoon I would make smoothies for everyone, which is our tradition on any vacation, or pretty much any given summer day. The local market had amazing fruit and I bought frozen spinach and Hawaiian spirulina, kefir, juice, and so we were good to go. I have to admit I make the best taste tasting and healthiest smoothies of all time. I also found these cute little umbrellas to make them extra fancy.

No vacation is complete with a good old fashioned water fight. Unfortunately for Aaron, he still is no match for my dad. Even with the flippers on.

One final sunset.

Goodbye Paradise

Preschool Graduation for my Grets

She did it. She graduated despite my many pleadings for her to stay right where she was. It was a Sunday morning and it was one of the sweetest things I’ve seen. Each child has been working on this life size self portrait and I hadn’t seen Greta’s at all. It was kept under lock and key until the graduation. Once we got there they were all hung up, all of the graduates, with little chairs in front. All three preschool years participated in singing songs with the graduating class. It was really sweet to see the 3 year olds sing “The Ants Go Marching” as Greta’s class marched onto stage. Once they were dismissed from the stage then the 4 year old class sang with them. Until finally it was just Greta and her classmates left. They sang You’ve Got a Friend in Me, and then This Little Light of Mine. For the last song the entire audience of parents, grandparents, all joined it. Then they patiently waited for their name to be called to receive their diploma.

She is the peanut of the class, and I’m sure that won’t be changing in Kindergarten either.

Here come the ants.

I’m Gonna Let It Shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine…

The director said something about every child when they were called up for their diploma. You didn’t know which child she was talking about until she finished, but I could guess when it was Greta’s turn. She spoke of how throughout the year she found her courage and her confidence. When starting this school she would get very timid and withdrawn if something unkind was done or said by another child. And slowly throughout the year she found her courage to speak up. Not that she has any problem at home when it comes to speaking up! But school is a whole other story for her.

So proud of you my love!

house project- ombre table

We are working on our little backyard a bit more. Slowly. But we are doing it. We are creating a little lounge area with fire pit. We foresee lots of marshmallow roasting in our future this fall and winter. We purchased some Adirondack chairs at Home Depot, which are still awaiting primer and paint, and Aaron picked up this little side table for $12! I spent a few days feeling wishy washy about what I was going to do. And then one morning driving in the car, yes, I get revelations often while driving in the car, it hit me. I really wanted to do green but I couldn’t decide if I wanted all one green, or two chairs to be one shade and two chairs another shade. That’s when I decided to do 4 different but very similar shades of green, each chair a different hue slightly than the next. I decided the table would be my super crafty project and do an ombre effect using all 4 shades.

Forget about the deciding of the greens. That took an entire day and a half for Aaron and I to agree. I was leaning toward greens with more blue in it and he was leaning towards green with yellows. We finally compromised and are so happy with the colors we chose. All are from Benjamin Moore’s Aura line, exterior paint, semi-gloss finish. I used two different primers, one light, one dark, because of the varying colors. This was labor intensive, but worth it in the end.

Here’s the side table before.

And here is the finished product. I was debating on doing each chair similar to this, but then I think it would be overkill. But I think this table with tie in all the shades perfectly.

one last field trip

I realize as everyone is prepping for back to school, I really need to blog about a final field trip Sawyer’s first grade class took, before he starts the 2nd grade! Somewhere in the midst of end of year school parties and swim lessons I forgot to post this. The entire first grade took school buses up to Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark. I have taken the kids before and it’s a great fun place. The entire class had a ball. Here’s what we picked.

Sawyer and a very good buddy. They crack me up.