A Princess Party -- The Sequel

Remember how last year Maddie wanted a princess party? Well, surprise! She wanted another one this year.

Since I used up all my ideas last year, I scoured the internets searching for inspiration and came up with a few new ideas.

This could be no generic princess theme; this girl knows all the Disney princesses and expected them all to be in attendance.




Starting with decorations. I made accordion rosettes out of construction paper and glued on little medallions of each princess (plus Mulan and Pocahantas, if you're technical.) These graced our side board. On the mirror, I used a dry erase marker to write "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"


And of course we needed to have Tangled lanterns for the back deck.



My favorite touch was the poison apple buffet: four varieties from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory including Apple Pie and Cheesecake. Yum!


We also tried to theme-ify Maddie's favorite food. Ariel's Shells and Cheese, Aurora's Magic Forest (broccoli!), and this Pinterest fail: Snow White's Gems (pictured much better here).


For fun, I made Maddie a play castle out of cardboard boxes, poster board and pink duct tape.



And as a party game, we played Under the Sea. I tossed a bunch of dollar store toys (bouncy balls, animal forks --or dinglehoffers, thank you!-- gem ice cube thingys, beach toys, etc...) into Maddie's Princess pool and filled it with water. I topped that with heaps of blue and green ribbons (waves and seaweed, get it?).


The kids really seemed to have fun digging in the water and kept throwing things in to find them again.

And that's the party. I'll try to post some pictures of the birthday girl and her guests soon, but I have to check with the official party photographer first (aka Dad). The funny thing is that there are still nine more days until her actual birthday. More celebrating to come!

Summer To-Do List

I'm sure everyone has this problem. You say, "This summer, we're finally going to..." And then, you blink and it's September. Right?

That's why I love summer to-do lists. Both for the anticipation of summer and the satisfaction of checking things off that you otherwise wouldn't have done.

I love this summer list:



That I saw on Meg Duerksen's blog a few years ago.

But I wanted something a little more suited for our gallery wall. So I broke my list up in favor of pennants:



Each item got its own little pennant, which we strung throughout the whole hall.




Under each to-do is a colorful pennant. Item completed? Flip the pennant. By the end of the summer, our living room should be very colorful!




I had the colorful, patterned scrap paper that I used for our finished flags, but Maddie got into this project and did some of her own, too.



Lots and lots of fun to-dos, like fishing, field trips, picnics and more.

April -- in the middle of May

April

I didn't forget to take it; I just forgot to post it. Here's the family on a beautiful day in April down by the river. And me sporting a new 'do.

Cut-outs and Time-outs

OMG, I haven't blogged in so long! My time-out started off as being a well-planned blog series that I never had time to get started. And then it turned into some major changes on our home front (mostly good that I promise to tell about at some point in the not so distant future) that required some additional time. And about six months ago, my laptop battery died. We finally replaced it and I decided it was time to start backing up the 16,000 MB of photos we have on it. That's taking a lot of time, too.

So life's been busying, but now I'm hopefully back to blogging again. Of course, the longer you stay away, the easier it is to get out of the habit! Fingers crossed for good habits.

I wanted to share my go-to independent project: cut-outs. This all started around Valentine's Day as a simple valentine card.




I cut hearts out of construction paper and Maddie would paint them with watercolors or sometimes color with markers. When I knew I would be busy babysitting or cooking dinner, I would prep by cutting out extra hearts and putting them on her art table. She would happily sit and paint for a bit.




After Valentine's Day was over, she kept asking what was next.




So we did Easter eggs.




Then butterflies.




And most recently flowers. (Please notice I had to add a thread stem, per her request.)




With our flowers we were able to give Maddie's great grandma a bouquet of flowers for Mother's Day.




I have no clue what is going on in Maddie's head here. But GG sure was happy.