Happy 9th Birthday Abby!

Abby turned nine this past friday October 14th. It hard to believe that the baby girl born 5 weeks early is now one year away from the double digits, dare I say she is approaching the "tween" age!! For her birthday she wanted a fancy dinner at home with a few girls. She wanted her dad and brother to wear suits to serve her and her friends. Then the girls slept over and enjoyed a pancake breakfast. It was fun, they laughed, got silly, played games, got silly some more and then managed to wind down and go to sleep.
Happy Birthday Abby! Mommy and Daddy love you to pieces!!


Here is the birthday girl and me before the party got started.


Here she is as her friends and family sing her happy birthday, notice her little brother Will is the blur in the background.


Our lovely waiters for the evening.

Here is how the dining room looked before the girls arrived. I brought out the fine china and all things pink!

For party favors I found these adorable zipper pouches from RKEM designs Etsy and placed a lip gloss in each. The girls also got monogramed zebra print tissues from Michaels to take home as well. It was a fun way to celebrate my special girl.

I feel truly blessed to have the family I have. Thank you Lord for creating are little family, we are truly grateful!

Valentine's Party 2nd grade

This year I was a co party planner for my daughter Abby's Valentine's Day Party. I thought I would blog about what we did as I am always searching for ideas. Also I am always forgetting what I did in year's past so I thought I would document it hear.




For goodie bags, we filled 4x6 dollar store valentine bags with a few goodies(my co planner scored cute bubbles from target super cheap). We then wrapped an individual microwave popcorn bag in wrapping paper, whole punched the top of the popcorn and bag and tied a ribbon to keep it together. I found these cute free owl valentine printable from living locurto and inserted them in the bags



Here is my own sweet valentine dressed in all pink and red for her party day.



For games we split the class in two and did relays. One relay was putting a balloon between your knees and walking to/from the start/finish lines. The second relay was to race to these index cards with candy taped on them. Each card had a task to perfrom and then the team that performed fastest won, but everyone got to keep the chocolate. We then did a cupcake walk by numbering construction paper hearts and playing music until your number was called. Then you were allowed to go claim your cupcake and get some of the other snacks provided. Lastly we bought large conversation hearts and had teams build the tallest tower they could in two minutes. The kids seemed to have fun. I saw another class do the relay where you try and sit on a balloon and pop it and the team that gets all their balloons popped first wins. I remember doing this as a kid and because I didn't weigh that much I was always the slowest at this task. I had forgotten about that game until I saw another class doing it.

In my son's kindergarten class they did this really cute game where each child pulled a piece of paper out of a bag and it had a picture of an animal on it. Then you had to go around making the noise your animal makes and find your partner. We have also played bingo in the past.

Hope you all had a great Valentine's day. My hubby surprised us each with a small gift when we got home from soccer practice. We typically don't celebrate Valentine's day so this was a very nice thing for him to do.