Lizzie's 9th Birthday/Little House on the Prairie Party

Lizzie's birthday was last week.  The day of she woke up to her door sealed up crepe paper (new this year because I thought it would be fun).  I woke up to her calling from her room, "Mom, my door is blocked with this stuff."  I said, yes, break through it, it's fun.  After school, between pottery class and soccer practice, the girls and I had dinner at Silver Diner.  It was kids night so Liz got to have her arm painted (in lieu of her face) and get some pirate booty out of a prize bucket.  Tonight Drew took her out for a special father-daughter date, a Nationals game.

Last Saturday we had Lizzie's Little House on the Prairie party.  It turned out so nice.  The cake was made by the fabulous Rachel Birch (I had purchased her services at church service auction).

We had the party at a local park because I didn't want 15 9-year-olds running through my home.  We really lucked out on the weather.  It was fabulous and we pretty much had the park to ourselves.

We decorated the pavillon with quilt squares that I haven't gotten around to sewing together (donated to me by my mother) and a couple of Ellie's baby quilts (made by Nana). I painted all the boxes we used with chalkboard paint so that they'd be kind of slate-themed and so that they'd be usable afterwards (and they are already in my food cupboards).  My mother kindly made all the pioneer bonnets for the girls.  They wore them during the festivities and then took them home as party favors. 

I limited Lizzie's guest list specifically so that we could have hats.  Liz wanted to invite a bunch of kids from school, her entire soccer team, neighborhood kids, all of the activity girls from church, and sundry other friends.  In the end she ended up mostly inviting school friends and I did the lazy mom invitation method: Evites.  I didn't send all my evites at once even.  I slowly invited people over the course of a week so I eventually had to hide the comments section.  I didn't want people to see that someone had accepted the party invitation five days before I got around to inviting them.

We started the party off by  making button jewelry.  Our button supply was donated by Nana, of course.  As soon as the buttons arrived in the mail Liz set aside some of her favorites so she could start a collection.  Seeing that, I told her that the buttons were actually from her Nana's collection and that Nana started her collection because her own grandma had a collection.  In response Liz said, "I wonder which one of my granddaughers will start a collection."  Awwww.

Next we made butter.  I had baby food jars for all the girls so they could each make their own.  I was surprised by how many girls hadn't done this before (and by how excited they were about it).

This photo cracks me up because she really was having fun, it was just a bad shot.

When the girls finished shaking their butter, we drained off the buttermilk and salted it and the kids sampled it on rolls.  We also had some homemade jam for the rolls as well.  Liz helped me make the jam a few days earlier.  She helped with everything but mashing the fruit because she said it looked too gross

Lizzie picked a red hat and by the time all her friends had selected theirs, there was a blue one left over for Lainey.  She seemed pretty delighted when I reminded her that in the books Laura had red ribbons while her blue-eyed sister, Mary, had blue ones.  Liz said that she liked wearing her hat hanging down her back because that's how Laura wore hers.

After butter and rolls, the girls played a version of duck, duck goose.  Then Andrew showed them how to do the stick pull and leg wrestling.

Group pic:

Next, we had our general store.  We gave each girl a brown paper bag and 10 pennies.  The girls loved it, but the black licorice and apples didn't really sale well.

And finally the cake:

The light breeze kept blowing out our candles before Liz could so we had to be strategic.

As the guests left Liz gave them each their own little pot of jam.

On the way home from Lizzie's party I started telling Andrew my ideas for future parties.  Lizzie: another book-inspired party, art, owl-themed sleep or late-over.  Lainey: art, ballet, my dollie & me tea.  Ellie: dog (at least that's what I'd do for her if her party was next month).  Andrew listened for a bit and then said, "Okay, you can tell me about two more party ideas and then we need to stop talking about this."  I'll bet that with three girls he's going to get pretty tired of wedding planning when the time comes.