Puppy Party

Sophie is a frustrated dog owner due to the fact that neither of her parents have any desire to own a dog! So her wanting a puppy party came as no surprise!

Pinterest was full of ideas and though I drew lots of ideas from there, the general idea was based on the ds game nintendogs.

First the girls chose, named and adopted a puppy - the certificates were then laminated for them. This done they moved through to the hall where there were activities set out for them to do as they wished.

The shop was a big hit, each girl was given an envelope of puppy pounds with their dog which they were able to spend at the shop on leads, accesories, toys, blanket and puppy food ( - cereal served in new, clean dog bowls.)

The shop was not quite set up when we took the pictures - but at least we remembered to take some!

Boutique, here they were able to give their dogs a wash and brush up!

Comberton vets, here the girls made sure their dog was healthy using a checklist.

The girls made tags to put on their collars using Hama beads, why I had imagined they would make circles I don't know they were far more creative! S shapes, squares, bones and hearts to name a few.

They decorated a white party box as their dogs pet carrier

We set up an agility course in the garden and the girls took part in time trials with a certificate for the fastest.

And of course a puppy cake which was inspired by a piece of art Sophie had created for a school project.

The best part of the party for me came after the initial excitement calmed down and the girls were just playing with their puppies, making up games with them. It was encouraging that at 8 and 9 they were still able to simply play.

Puppy power!

Sophie's birthday comes hot on the heels of Annie's and so it's a quick turn around as we head from frozen to puppies! Toy ones obviously! Right now I'm in the middle of sewing accessories! But the invites are done and delivered!

What all the best dressed pups are wearing this year!

Let it gooooo.....

Frozen is still a favourite with our youngest daughter, so there wasn't really any question as to what her party would be!

Pinterest is full of great ideas for parties especially frozen parties - the mistake is to let your 5 year old get involved! As often is the case I forgot till after the event to take photos! At most of the girls parties the camera makes it's appearance with the cake! This party was no exception, but most of the ideas are to be found on Pinterest posted by people who remember to take pictures!
Annie's party consisted of a mixture of jumping around games, quiet games, individual and team games.
Each of the children was given a named plastic cup placed on a window ledge and any prizes they collected went in the cup!
We started with some old favourites played with a frozen twist!
Musical statues - when the music stops you freeze like Anna!
Musical bumps - when the music stops act like a troll and roll (roll into a ball rather than doing a forward roll!)
We then put the children into teams for some of the games:
The Snowball Game
Teams of children got to throw white pom-poms into numbered buckets, scoring the number of points on the bucket.

Snowball Skittles
Polystyrene cups were decorated to look like snowmen, stacked into a pyramid, the teams then took turns to throw snowball Pom poms at them scoring 1 point for every cup knocked down.
We played these at the same time, two teams on each then swopped over so that the time spent waiting was limited.
Pin the Nose on Olaf
Each team had a picture of Olaf and a carrot nose each which they attempted to blu tack in the right place.
Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

These were printed from Pinterest then laminated for durability and were a good quieter game, each team had a set and a dice and the teams raced each other.
Pairs

Each team had a set of frozen pairs, printed from Disneys activity pack, they took turns to play pairs with the first team to find all the pairs winning
We then moved to Some individual games :
Each corner of the room had a character, Elsa, Anna, Svenn and Christoff, when instructed the children had to choose a character, a card was then drawn from a set if cards containing the four characters if your character was chosen you were out.
Frozen heart

Basically hot potato with a heart!
Pass the parcel
This was regular pass the parcel, but at the end while sitting in their circle each child was given one of the Pom Pom snowballs from the earlier games, a felt nose attatched to an elastic band, two adhesive google eyes and a mouth cut from sticky felt. With help the children transformed their snowball into a snowman.

The goody bags were the take home present in themselves, exercising my sewing machine skills somewhat!

Inside was a roll of frozen activity sheets, a deconstructed Olaf and only because mr Tesco reduced them to 10p a pack of frozen stickers!
It was fun to organise and run and she loved it!

Life from the back of the pack: Rebecca is nine

Craft parties are the party of the moment it seems well if your 9 and go to Barton Primary anyway!

I decided to have 6 craft options running simultaneously and kept my eyes open for bargains!
The result was : Felt bags, painted coasters, Decopatch bird houses, loom bands, Hama beads, and butterfly tags.
The bags were reduced Easter stock from Tesco. The original design was tricky so some savvy ones left out the side panels and sewed a simple bag!

Decopatch is always fun, in my head they were using one colour for the walls and another for the roof, the reality is that they used a complete mix on all of it and bizarrely it worked!

The coasters were another Easter bargain, this time from hobby craft. Some had more success with the stencils than others, but they enjoyed painting them anyway.

Loom bands were definatly the favoured activity but all the girls took home a selection of crafts, and having a garden available meant that they could have a run around when they hah had enough crafting!!

Rebecca's cake followed the craft theme, I purchased a silicone mould for the buttons but wasn't happy with the result so opted to make my own.

She had a butterfly theme running through the decorations and tableware so these were incorporated in her cup cakes.

It was a fun afternoon !

The plans are now underway for next years parties! No joke Sophie is planning a loomy party! And Annie a frozen party - even discussing costumes with her friends! I guess with 6 months to go she will have it all sorted by February!!

Monster Mayhem

This year Rebecca chose a Moshi Party for her birthday - for those not in the know Moshi's are computer  characters - you choose a character and design their room - they vary from cute and cuddly to truely bizarre you then chose your activities from challenges to puzzles to games.

Rebecca's monster is Katsuma, fortunatly this is one of the main characters so lots of stuff out there.

 The monsters all have the same eye and one of Rebecca's favourite puzzles involves counting eyes so the eyes feature in several ways - cut out eyes decorated the hall and the sides of her cake - her cup cakes featured the eyes though with hindsight the children actually preferred buttercream to the fondant icing.

In addition to the eyes the hall was decorated with moshi characters purchased from party pieces  - what I hadn't realised is that these came on two sheets of plastic and all needed to be cut out!!

I used craft artist to create the letters of her name from a computer wallpaper image of Katsuma which worked well amongst the eyes.

 I had very clear intructions when it came to her cake - this year I even got a diagram!! it was to be round and flat - with her Moshi on top - this also had to be flat!!! She did design it with daisies round the edge but after some negotiation we agreed on some of the moshi plants that grow in her garden!!!

 The sides were made by adding a purple sugarpaste band  then using varied sizes of circle cutter to create the eyes.

 Katsuma was created by printing a pictture from the internet and using this as a pattern to form the character.

 One of the games the girls enjoy is the 'Ice Sceam shop' so this was included in the plans  - we served ice-cream for pudding and Rebecca helped serve the toppings - we even managed green sauce with the cunning addition of green food colour to some squeezy syrup.

The children were all placed into Moshi  teams when they arrived and had the chance to decorate their own moshi masks , we then had several rounds of timed activities - these were varied to allow children of different ages and abilities to participate: they included crosswords, wordsearch, treasure hunt, mazes amongst others but the favourite by far was the create a mummy round!

The time went so quickly and the children were dispatched full of sugar!! with a moshi activity book - a great deal from the Book People and the sweets and przes they had won during the rounds of puzzle palace.