Lily wanted a Luau themed birthday this year. It was fun to plan and do. Here are the Flip Flop invitations we sent out: (I blacked out all of our personal info)
Lily requested a waffle breakfast that morning, with whip cream and strawberries:
Here was the beach cake I made. Lily helped me decorate it with Teddy Grahams and Life Saver gummies as the inner tubes, and paper umbrellas. She was so proud of the fact that she came up with the idea of wrapping some of the bears up in the "towels" or the Fruit By The Foot candy. It was a great idea! The "sand" is just graham cracker crumbs. I made very similar cupcakes for Izzy's pool party last year.
It was a homemade strawberry cake, made with fresh strawberries. I made it once for when the missionaries came for dinner a couple of months ago, and Lily loved it. She has been requesting it for her birthday ever since. The icing is a cream cheese icing, and all of the kids really loved it. It was the first time ever that the entire cake was completely eaten by all of the children. We usually always have left overs, but not in this case! They were all asking for seconds and even thirds. It is a very delicious cake, if I say so myself!
Posing with the cake and the big 8 candle:
Excited to open the gifts from her family:
Everyone is practising hula dancing:
I never got a picture of the blizzardy storm that we all woke up to, but here is the huge amount of heavy wet snow it left! It seemed so ironic to have a luau on this day. It was great! Warm thoughts, right?
I made this pineapple tower wuith fruit around it as a center piece. Just long skewers were used to attach the pineapples. It was surprisingly easy and sturdy!
We had this poster cut out the kids could put their faces into:
Even Ben and I had a turn:
Making the paper Lei's:
And playing all of the games!!! We did a whole bunch of Minute to Win It games. The kids had a blast.
This one was a race to see who could pull out all of the tissue the fastest with one hand (don't worry we will not let that tissue go to waste!)
Then, we took the empty tissue boxes and fastened a string to them, and tied them around the kids waists. We put 6 ping pong balls in each one, and they had to have a race to see who could wiggle them out the fastest. We had 3 kids going at once, and the others loved to watch and cheer them on:
Then we had a relay race where the kids had to flap a piece of cardboard to make wind and move one ping pong ball across the line:
Then they had to pick up penne noodles with a spaghetti noodle in their mouth. One boy asked if he could take home some noodles to let his mom know he wanted this game at his party, haha.
They had to spin around and wrap themselves up with toilet paper using no hands. They loved this too! It would have made me way too dizzy.
We did a few other games, but I did not get pictures of all of them. This age group is perfect for the Minute to Win it style games, they loved them.
Cake time!
Everyone really enjoyed it:
Presents! Spin the bottle to see which gift to open:
Izzy actually used her birthday money she got from Great Nana to buy Lily this school t-shirt as a gift. Lily was really happy and put it on right away. Izzy can be so thoughtful and selfless!
A while back Izzy had a luau themed Activity Days activity, where she was taught a hula dance to the song, The Hukilau, and she begged and begged to teach it at the party. So we let her do it at the end. She did an awesome job! All of the kids liked following her. We found the song online and played it nice and loud for all the kids to hear.
It was a fun party!
The day before, we wrapped up every item in Lily's lunch as a surprise for her at school! She loved it! She said all the kids loved it too. It must've been fun for her to open all those "gifts" at school.
And here is one final picture of her the night before with her traditional birthday balloon and stuffed animal. She really wanted that octopus.
Happy Birthday dear Lily!!! We love you so much!
