Wow, I can’t believe it has been so long since I posted! It is unreal how fast time goes by and yet just feels like the blink of an eye. I’ve been busy over here with the kids and recently just had Hailey’s birthday party. I’m now planning Sophia’s party and unbelievably August’s 1st Birthday. I will put up blogs on those as well!
Hailey wanted a Paris theme and a photo booth for her and her friends. I had the brillant idea to make a balloon garland to go around the photo booth. One of my besties makes these all the time and they always look amazing. Which by the way if you are looking for an amazing blog to follow, Mominvanhattan is the one! So back to the lovely balloon garland. I wanted to make a really big one, to drape around the window. When I was at party city buying balloons I found balloon vine tape. It is a long clear plastic vine with holes in it. The idea is that you blow up the balloons and put the ends through the holes in the vine.
I’m not going to lie, it was not easy! First I had 24″ balloons that I needed to blow up….silly me didn’t get a pump. After blowing up 3 of these big balloons, everything started going black and I had to lay on the ground. So I went and bought a pump, so much easier to do! I had August’s room filled with 14 gigantic balloons and 5 bags of 12″ inch balloons. It took a few days to attach all the balloons to the vine. I found it a little difficult as well, you need to alternate the sides when you put the ballonons in. When the balloons are bunched together it was really difficult to keep adding more. Some of them were stretched really far from the vine, due to the width of the surrounding balloons. Once I had it all together it looked pretty good, I got it hung up and had to add in the small black balloons. It helped cover up some of the spaces where you could see through to the middle. It was a lot of work, it was all worth it to see the smiles on her birthday. Everyone loved the photo booth. I also purchased a Paris scene setter from Party City as well as Paris photo booth props. It looked really neat because I put it on the window, so the light came through and gave it a pink hue.
We tried to keep things low key as Hailey got some pretty amazing gifts from us. For a cake all she wanted was an ice cream cake. I got a sheet cake from Dairy Queen, it just had confetti sprinkles on it. I had them write on it and I placed an Eiffel Tower on top of it. The kids had a massive water balloon fight with 500 balloons. I bought the bunch o balloons from Costco, I love the fact that the kids can fill the water balloons themselves. After the water balloon fight, Hailey had a couple other games that she got everyone to play. She had taken the prizes we bought and wrapped them in about 20 layers of newspaper and tons of tape. She had everyone sit in a circle, they each had 10 secs to unwrap as much as they could. They just continued to pass it around and the person to unwrap the gift, kept it. We did pizza for food, I also had croissants, two bite brownies, veggies and chips out for all the kids to eat. It was nice and simple, but they all had a great time. To finish off the party, they played Just Dance and had competitions with each other.
This was Hailey’s last big party! Now that she is 12 I just feel that these big parties are not needed and they are just getting too old for them. However their Sweet 16 will be another story! It makes me a little sad, I’ve spent years and hours making amazing birthday parties for all 3 of the older kids. They still bring up all their birthday parties that they have had. I am so glad that they will hold those memories.
Being me, loving you 