Party On! Adaleine's Fancy Nancy Birthday Party

Hello Dahlings! Just popping in to say bonjour and share with you all the particulars of Miss Adaleine’s Grand Birthday Soiree that we hosted last weekend! I think everyone had a mahvelous time!

I was so excited about these invitations. I purchased them for just $10 from the Etsy shop PixelParade (here's the link to these invites if you want it) and just used a little glue to attach some sparkly cardstock to the back. I got the sparkle cardstock when it was on sale at Hobby Lobby, but if you don't want to spend the extra bucks these invites would still look super cute without it.

And here is a picture of our birthday girl! (Sorry about the weird lighting. This house has wonky lighting all over the place. Sigh) I somehow missed this step last year, so I made sure to capture her pretty smile this year. Since it was a Fancy Nancy party, Sissy chose her fanciest dress, put a pink shirt underneath, and added some fun leggings to complete the ensemble. You can see one of the signs I made for the party on the door behind her. This one says, "Bonjour! Welcome to my soiree!"

Here is our food table before I got the pink punch out. I had so much fun with this and I think it turned out looking pretty fancy : ) I used doilies under everything so that upped the fancy factor, too. My cake-making sister moved away for a year (curse you, Minnesota!), so I went with cupcakes for Sweet Adaleine's party. Since my dear sister was unable to make cake for this party, she made a million tissue paper flowers instead! And I have to say, they really made the party. : ) If you want to see some of the cakes Tiffany has made for our other parties, click here, here, and here.

Side note about the cupcake stand: my husband rocks. He cut plywood pieces for me before going to work one night so I could set up this cupcake stand. I then covered the boards with some of the disposable table runner left over from Eden's butterfly party and used upside-down drinking glasses as supports. I got the idea from this brilliant lady here.

I added pink and purple food coloring to white cake mixes to color the cakes and just went with simple white frosting. Sprinkles and pom picks from Target {clearance!} made them fancy. I wish I had taken the time to make pretty wraps for all the cupcakes like this, but that would have just been too much for me this time.

I dipped a package of marshmallows in almond bark and then covered them in rainbow sprinkles that I already had. Bonus points for not dishing out more dough! (I'm so cheap it's scary)

I bet you were wondering where the pretzels were, huh? I simply cannot have a party without pretzels, so I went with the old 'dip them in almond bark' standby and called it good. I may have eaten a couple hundred while I was dipping them. Those things are so good!

For our games, we played 'Accessorize Fancy Ada,' which was a big hit. I had a Fancy Nancy coloring page (found here) printed as a 24x36" engineering print at Staples for less than $4! Then I bought a new box of colored pencils and turned on a movie. I colored her hair a little darker than the actual book character's so she looked more like the birthday girl. The bows are not in this picture, but I just used white return address labels and printed pink, orange, and purple bows onto them. 

I didn't think this one through since it was a preschool-age party and THEY CAN'T READ, but next we 'played' (being very kind with that word usage) 'Fancy Talk' where the kids match up fancy words and plain words. Oh well, I had fun making it. : )

Right behind this little stud muffin here you can see the table we had set up for the kids to kill a little time while they waited for everyone to arrive. The sign said 'Adorn Yourselves' and I got little plastic top hats for the boys and tiaras for the girls, along with mustaches and bracelets. I may be biased, but I think this kid really rocks the socks off that 'stache.

 I kept favors simple (and cheap!) by just doing little baggies of chocolate chip cookies tied up with ribbon and a card that said, "Thanks for being fancy with me! Merci!" 

And last but not least I had to share this picture. See sweet Adaleine with her little bouquet of flowers in this picture? See the little boy in the background? He brought her those all tied up with a ribbon. Cutest.thing.ever. I might be planning their wedding in my head already. Justkiddingnotreally.

I didn't get a picture for some reason, but I also hung up a buttload of streamers (reminds me of Wreck It Ralph every time I hear that phrase) all around the rooms so it just felt like a great big fancy party. Adaleine asked if we could keep them up forever. I said one week. It has now been eight days and I'm too tired to take them down. Hey, if we leave them up another couple weeks I can call them Christmas decorations!

Have a very fancy day! : )

A 'Despicable' Halloween

Okay, so I failed miserably with my resolution to blog every day for 30 days. I’m bummed but trying not to be too hard on myself (which is what I would normally do) and just admit that maybe this wasn’t the year for it. I might try again next year, who knows? There are still a couple of posts I’ve got tossing around in my head that go along with my Moving Right Along theme, but I’ll get to them later on. : )

I just wanted to post today and share with you a couple pictures of the munsters from Halloween. I shared last year about their Toy Story themed costumes and how I made them, but this year we went for simple and easy. 

We stuck with keeping all kids in a common theme (which I will do for as long as they’ll let me) and chose another kids movie. Despicable Me! This is hands-down my favorite animated movie right now.

Eden dressed up as Margo, Adaleine was Agnes, and Judah rounded out the trio as Gru. It was really simple and very little effort was required on my part, which I loved. 

 

 

 The only minorly crafty things I had to do were add darts to the jacket I found for Miss Eden to wear and to draw stripes onto Sissy's shirt with a marker! My sister crocheted the scarf for Judah, so black shirt and pants completed his outfit with zero effort from me. If only every year could be this easy! Hope you had a happy Halloween and ate all the Milky Ways you could hold. Diet starts tomorrow ; )