Planning a Party-Teasers

It is the eve before Lily's birthday party.  We have been planning and prepping for a few weeks now.  I know it may sound silly to go to such effort for a girl that will be too young to really understand, however our son's first birthday was a bit depressing (go figure) so I really wanted to do something special this year.  I'm getting a bit nervous-read:neurotic-about the whole thing.  I decided to post some teasers of tomorrows event.  Then tomorrow (or whenever I recover) I'll post some real pictures about the party and then I swear I'll give it a rest.  Trust me, I got some blogging to do about our cat-yes steady your breathe.  Anyways here we go.....

The Cookies:  I was in charge of decorating all the cookies my mom baked.  I thought icing cookies would be simple, I was dead wrong.  Food network I owe you an apology.  After getting banished out of the kitchen and permanently off cookie duty, my mom covered our shame with sprinkles.

It's a kid's first birthday.  Like Lily knows what a castle looks like.

The Party Favors:  Keeping in my theme of choosing vaguely age-inappropriate toys,  I selected swords and wands.  As I have pointed out in a previous blog I have now realized it is not the smartest thing to jack kids full of sugar and then give them things to hit themselves with.

A grainy picture of the girl's goodie bag.

Arts and Crafts:  Somewhere, somehow down the line someone thought I was crafty.  I am crafty but not in the "create works of art" kind of way.  I'm more crafty in the "talk your way out of this one now Kali" kind of way.  However I did construct a welcome sign, the secret? glitter glue.  It's the sprinkles of the arts and crafts world (see above about sprinkles and decorating cookies).  I was actually semi-proud of my job until my sister asked tonight "what the hell is that? wrapping paper?".

I have also posted pictures of the invitation in a previous blog.  It was really just me applying stickers.  Apparently they were starting to peel by the time they reached their destination.  I blame Canada Post.

The Decor: We never got around to actually doing the decor because we ended up spending most of our time trying to make the cake pops.  Whatever my mom and sister come up with I'm sure will be amazing *wink wink*.  Which brings us to the.....

The Cake Pops: We attempted to try to do cake pops.  Way harder to do then one would think.  They are basically cake mixed with icing, rolled into a ball and then dipped with chocolate.  If you're really talented they can be quite elaborate.  We decided not to push our luck.  They ended up taking hours to do and hours for my mom to fix.  On a side note, Timbits dipped with chocolate can make the same effect...that's the Maple Ridge way of doing things....

Melted chocolate tends to run.  Problem solving test#1:Figure out how to keep the chocolate on the pop and not on the table or hands

The tops went all flat.  I say it's to celebrate the fact that Lily's head is also flat.  Not everything has to be perfectly round.

Once again my mom saves the day-add a little icing and the flat tops are now flowers.

The dress:  After I used Lily's princess dress for her one year old photo shoot, I decided we couldn't have her parade around in the dress a second time, like a hobo.  So my mom bought her an actual Cinderella dress.  It says Cinderella on the tag.

Can't wait to see what it looks like on her.

The Thank you cards: Thank you cards use to be such a strenuous task.  It wasn't that I'm not thankful, they just seemed exhausting to do and took forever to complete.  It wasn't until Lily's baby shower that I realized the secret: Leave the husband out of it.  For my wedding, I made my husband help choose the template and photo (which involved us going back and forth on templates and phrases until it was perfect), making him help with what to write (I swear Lily has a longer attention span, plus I had to tell him what seems funny in your head may be lost in translation without the tone and just come off as insulting on paper) and trying to get him to chase down addresses (so the finished cards would sit on my nightstand for months).  After Lily's baby shower I picked the card and phrasing myself, ordered the prints and sent them off. I was done in a day or two.  Anyways since Dave went straight to bed I decided to work on them tonight.  I have just finished designing my cards and just need to order them. 

Wish me luck tomorrow!