The Invitations
The invitations were not my idea. I must give credit to my neighbor, Stacy, and her creative brain :) She came up with the idea and helped me put them together. We made them with my Cricut. I especially loved that they were unique and not like any I've seen. You pull the dolphin up and it has the party information on that card.
The Decorations
This is a balloon wreath that I made for the front door. I found inspiration on Pinterest, of course ;) and wanted to have it done for Ella's birthday but didn't make it. There is a number 5 with her name on it that I can take off and replace with whoevers age/name.
The centerpieces of the table were hurricane vases filled with green crinkle paper packing filler and then dolphins and a number 5.
Ok, so sandwiches are food and not decorations, but I just wanted to show that we made ham sandwiches in the shape of dolphins. I found a sandwich cutter at Wal-Mart and when you use it to cut the sandwich you get two dolphins and a heart. Cute, huh?
I also had blue Hawaiian Punch in a drink dispenser that had a chalkboard tag around it that said "Ocean Water" and I had decorated around the bottom with sand and seashells. I know I took a picture but perhaps I dreamed it as I can't seem to find it now. Big sigh.......
The Cake
We had a cake tragedy this morning. Oh my. I can laugh now, but was on the verge of tears this morning. The story goes like this.....Ella and Leah had their friends Eva and JB spend the night last night. I got up at 6am and started cleaning and getting ready for the 10am party. I asked Charles to go get Leah's dolphin balloon filled with helium. He said he would rather me do it so I asked him to get the kids breakfast started (I had bought Pillsbury cinnamon rolls). I always put my finished cakes in the oven to keep them from little fingers in the icing or some sort of accident or something. I always do this. See where this is going?? He didn't think about it until he went to put the cinnamon rolls in the preheated oven. You've heard of twice baked potatoes?? Now we had twice baked cupcakes!! Luckily, the cupcakes themselves were fine, but the icing was a different story. It had changed colors and gotten so hard and cracked I couldn't even get candles to go through it. When I got home and found out, panic ensued. I took a shower and prayed.......prayed that God would help me be loving and forgiving to Charles because I know he didn't ruin them on purpose and that He would help me to salvage Leah's cake. So, I scraped off the hard, crusty icing and made a new batch. I re-decorated the dolphin (though this rush job did not end up as cute as yesterdays). The cupcakes, thankfully, we just as good and moist as they should have been :)
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| The cupcakes in dolphin formation. |
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| The re-decorated dolphin. See the waves (how crusty and hard) that's how the whole dolphin was! Eek! This rush version wasn't as cute as the first one. |
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I wan't sure I'd have enough cupcakes with just the dolphin (though I did) and so these are decorated with teal icing, sprinkled with brown sugar for sand, and fondant sea shells, starfish, coral, and sand dollar toppers.The Games
They played three games: (1) pin the tail on the dolphin (again, if you haven't seen the movie, you might not understand) (2) water balloon fights (3) dolphin pinata.
Pin the Tail on the Dolphin
The pin the tail on the dolphin, I again have to give thanks to Stacy. She drew him out and painted him as well as all of the individual tails. I think she did a great job!! The kids had fun. We blindfolded them, made them spin around five times (since it was Leah's fifth birthday) and then pin. I think Leah actually came the closest but pretty much tied with Annalee and Matthew.
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Water Balloon Fights
I had in mind a couple of games to play with the water balloons but the kids just wanted to throw them at each other. It was so hot I didn't even care :) It will kind of hurt your feelings though that you spend hours filling up 110 water balloons and they were confetti in the yard within a matter of minutes!!!
(No pictures of the actual fights. I was actually using the camcorder during that.)
Dolphin Pinata
I had the pinata filled with Skittles, Twizzlers, DumDums, dolphin stickers, dolphin necklaces, and gum. As soon as it was open, chaos erupted. The sweet children turned into little vultures. Seriously.
My Sweet Baby Leah
Here are a couple pictures of Leah. The first is her blowing out her candles and the second is her opening her presents.
I am so grateful and thankful to the Lord for all of the great family and friends that He has blessed us with. Those who don't mind enduring the Alabama July heat for a couple of hours to bring a smile and a sweet memory to my sweet baby's heart. We are so very blessed!!
