Claire's Princess Party!

Claire is six years old! She is growing so fast!! As she approaches her last few days of kindergarten, I wanted to write some things about her as a five-year-old over this past year.  She is very social, and is friends with nearly all the kids she knows.  I have watched her be a leader among her peers, and she is very friendly.  She loves to sing, and always remembers the songs she learns at school and comes home and sings them to us.  The most recent ones include "Tony Chestnut" and "Kiss Your Brain".  Too cute.  She loves to dress up and play pretend, and she has quite a good imagination for these games.  She is quite smart, and is getting much more fluent at reading.  She is good at making the leap between sounding words out and saying them fluently.  She is dramatic, and sometimes uses drama to her advantage.  She loves to dance and nearly every night she puts on a dance show for us, complete with dress-up costumes.  Although sometimes it is a fashion show, and sometimes an art show.  She loves to have all the attention on her! She loves to please adults, especially Mom and Dad and her teachers both at school and at church.  She LOVES Mrs. Potter, her kindergarten teacher (and frankly so do I! That woman is amazing!).  She is very loving and likes to do things to make me happy, like offer to help me with all my chores.  She is a happy girl with few worries, and she is a joy to be around! 

So I usually do really small, low-key birthday parties for my kids, but for her 6th birthday, Claire wanted to invite lots of friends, and so I said, okay, we'll try out this whole big birthday party thing. So she chose to have a princess party, invited eleven of her little friends and I got to work! I used ideas from family, friends, and pinterest and went to town!  I made decorations, I made truffles, I made chocolate dipped strawberries, I made three ice cream cakes, and that wasn't all! I prepared all the lace for the girls to make their crowns, which turned out SO adorable! Not to mention finishing clearing the house of boxes and making sure it was all clean--between moving and all of our traveling lately, the house is not usually all clean! Anyway, it was a lot of work, and I am so grateful that Scott was here to help me with it, because there's no way I could have done it all myself! 

We had a fun little dipping party to prepare the strawberries and truffles

Oreo truffles.  Mmmmm.

The decorations.  I love those pom pom balls and saved them, so now they are a permanent decoration in the nursery.

Scott hung up the balloons for me, and stuffed the goody bags

Claire wearing the happy birthday glasses as her friends start to arrive. 

 

 

The first thing the girls did was to dress up like princesses, of course! It's a princess party!

 Then we put together the crowns for all the girls.  I spent a lot of time the day before getting those little beauties ready.  They were a lot of work to prepare, but they were so adorable! I would totally do it again!  The girls loved them!!

Opening presents! Look at those adorable crowns!

A birthday card written by Claire's friend, Adilyn.  Supremely adorable!

 I must say, the food was particularly fabulous at the party.  We had pizza, a veggie tray, pirouette cookies, yummy sherbet punch and the fun strawberries and truffles, then, of course came the ice cream cakes!

The first ice cream cake to be decorated

The three ice cream cakes! They were so delicious.

Singing happy birthday

Happy birthday, princess Claire!

Although I probably won't ever do another party that is quite so involved, it was lots of fun to have such a cute, girly celebration!  Claire loved it and her friends loved it. A big thank you to Mom and Dad Henderson and Brady and Tenya Hall for coming and helping out during the party, and a HUGE thank you to Scott and Robert for all their help, including (but not limited to) running to the store at the last second for cake decorating supplies, which somehow got lost in the move. 

Whew! We did it! Happy Birthday, my sweet, spunky Claire! I love you!