The Tea Party Birthday Party

You know you love your sister when you are willing to paint flower pots for her. In pink. Yes, it’s true, an 8 year old boy willingly spent an hour carefully applying several coats of bubblegum pink paint because he loves his sister that much.

For B’s 7th birthday, she decided she wanted to have a tea party birthday party, and wear her very prettiest most princessy dress. And have rainbows. Lots and lots of rainbows. Further questioning and brainstorming determined that there are a few very essential ingredients for tea parties that must absolutely be included.

Everyone must wear pretty dresses except the boys, who can wear whatever they want. Unless someone doesn’t want to wear a pretty dress. Then they can dress however they wish, as long as they look nice. A craft project or two is absolutely required, and games in the backyard, as is a fancy-set table with flowers and everything. Rainbow foods, like m&m’s and rainbow chocolate chip cookies would be just perfect. And cake, and ice cream too, of course. With rainbow sprinkles. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if the whole party could take place in the backyard with a long table set with all kinds of pretty dishes and flowers and things just like in Alice in Wonderland? (we’ve been reading the book with it’s lovely pen and ink drawings).

Curiouser and curiouser, tea is not actually a requirement; only tea cups are necessary for a successful garden tea party.

A quick trip to the dollar store ensued and we found some lovely treasures for crafts and loot bags, finished it up with a quick trip to Michael’s for craft supplies, and the grocery store for rainbow food. But we still hadn’t found fussy, girly flower vases for the table or for decorating the foyer (at least, not within my budget for a kid’s birthday party).

But we did have apple juice cans, and a big brother willing to paint them. Pink. For his sister.

After the paint dried, I wrapped them with a strip of black gingham and some coloured raffia and filled them with rocks for weight, and fake flowers we had purchased at the dollar store. We already had a purse-shaped tin vase with a plant growing in it, so it joined the flower cans on the birthday table, with a few extra fake flowers for good measure.

The kitchen island was set with more flowers, and lots of food. Tea party food. Little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a veggies-and-dip plate, brownies, cookies, crackers and cheese, cookies,  fruit, m&m’s, rainbow twizzlers, more cookies, and the cutest little black and white polka-dot and teddy bear picture tea cups (thank you, dollar store).

And of course, the birthday cake.

Before you start thinking that fake flowers are a regular part of our decorating vocabulary, you should know that we not only bought tons of them, we then promptly tore most of the flowers of the stems and threw them in a basket, ready for crafting. You see, at the dollar store, we had also found these:

Straw garden hats, and little flower pots. We also found little wood bird houses and kids’ gardening gloves in cute, bright colours. During the party, we decorated the little flower pots and then planted seeds in them and carefully wrapped them up for the little gardeners to take home with them. We decorated the bird houses with little wooden flower stickers and tiny fake birds. And we took those fake flowers and glued them all over the straw garden hats. Well, the girls did. The boys got camouflage patterned caps and sat and played board games while the girls glued flowers. And more flowers. And more flowers. Then we went outside to play games like chinese jump rope and have egg-and-spoon races. Most of the kids had never played these games, much to my surprise, and they were a huge hit.

When it came time to open presents, we got the cutest. birthday. photo. ever. Seriously. How cute is this?

Did I mention the cake? We had cake. Can’t forget the birthday cake.

Rainbow birthday cake.