Emma's 8th Birthday Party

A few weeks ago we threw an American Girl birthday party for Emma's 8th Birthday. Of course it ended up raining that day (as it always does for Emma's parties)... so that meant that we had 13 girls inside our house for the party... just a little stress for this pregger mom who had planned for the girls to be outside playing the whole time...

I am happy to say that all survived and I would like to make the proclamation that I will NEVER throw a party like this again. It was honestly three weeks ago and I am just getting over the trauma enough to speak about the events of the day... Girls had fun but I was traumatized.

Emma and I made all of the decorations with my silhouette machine that I got for Christmas. We got a HUGE book of American Girl Scrapbook paper (150 pages) that I cut to make banners, pinwheels, signs, bands for water bottles, gift bags and much more. With my 50% of Michael’s coupon the paper was only $12.50 and well worth the expense! Plus we still have like 100 pages to use for future arts projects.

Here are a few photos of the day that I took... before things got too crazy. A good friend also took some and I will share those later.

Emma LOVED wrapping the American Girl paper around the bottles of water... or course none of the girls reached for water when fruit punch and Lemonade were also available.. but I had to have them on hand... two days later Emma peeled off these bands and we put on pink and blue ones for the gender party.

The yummy table filled with goodies and sweets... If you choose to have a party like this let me recommend NOT serving red velvet cake to 13 eight year olds in your living room... You will need to invest in new furniture after!

Loved these Wilson cupcake wrappers from Michaels.

Found a photo of chocolate covered Oreos on Pinterest... DO NOT ever try to make these! You will go through two packages of double stuffed oreos just to get 12 oreo pops and you will scream obscenities all over your house as the cookies break each time you touch them... the two that you see in the front were the only ones that look right.... towards the end I just poured the melted chocolate over to ensure that they didn't break during the dipping process.... NOT WORTH IT !

We served the girls pizza, pigs in a blanket, chicken nuggets, pretzels and fruit... not the healthiest but easy!

Made these goodie bags for each of the girls with their first initial in the front. The bags included Candy, a notebook, pencils, and twisty straws.

I thought that we were going to have to scrap the piñata since we were indoors... but with a little creativity from the guys were able to literally "pull it off"... more on that in a second...

As the girls started to arrive they all went down to our basement where we had set up tables and they played with their American Girl dolls... p.s. giving the girls fruit punch and Paint down here... not my best idea... that damn rain just ruined all of my plans... let's just say there maybe a few stains in this carpet...

Here are the guys coming up with a way to still do the piñata... they poked holes in the sides and treaded through 13 pieces of twine and had each girl pull at the same time... crazy!

At least Emma and all the girls had a great time! That is all that matters!

More photos to come at a later date.