My little April wildflower turns 5 years old today. When you have a house of boys, a “Bubblegum ballerina princess tea party” seems like an inviting challenge to make birthday dreams come true. I always swear after each birthday I am going to keep it reeeeaaaal simple from here on out, and then my hyper active love for a good color scheme kicks in, and twelve hours later you are sitting in a pile of balloons wondering how on earth I am going to complete such a task. Regardless, I think I may have enjoyed the day as much as she did. I’ll never forget how her face lit up though when she saw that cake, and how she clasped her hands together and jumped up and down when she saw the balloons.
Set up: So happy I had this gathre mat on hand to use for the table cloth. Makes for easy clean ups! I used faux greens for the tabletop, and found the paper flower garland from Target as well as the polka dot paper plates. Our local grocery story actually made petit fours in the bakery! (My American Girl Doll heart was beating wildly.) We served the little petit fours with juice for tea, as well as fruit and crackers. It was Veronica’s idea to put out her favorite headbands to share with her friends to wear at the tea party.
Bar cart: This was filled with flowers, taffy, bubblegum, and pink lemonade just to make sure we had enough sugar going on (yikes). You can order 36” balloons with decorative tails online, but let me tell you….they are much cheaper at Party City. $5 each including helium. I added a few palm leaves to the balloon tails.
Cotton candy Cake: The center of the cotton candy cake was just the strawberry cake box mix. I used small cake tins to stack 4. Veronica was the one that remembered that you can buy cotton candy at the movie theatre! $4 for a huge bag of it. The best way to get the cotton candy look is to mess with it as little as possible. I smeared a little bit of icing around the edges for stick factor, and pulled apart the cotton candy in circle chunks. It sticks and stacks really well. There were three colors in the bag so we started with the peach at the bottom and ended with the pink. You can just stick in the candles at the top. NOTE: Do not make this cake ahead of time as it will shrivel up and die due to air and moisture exposure as I so conveniently forgot the day before. Just add the cotton candy right before the party. Takes about ten minutes total!
Balloon Garland: Simpler than it looks I promise. I used two packs of standard balloons and as you blow them up, tie them around a wrapped floral wire. The gold tassels I slid on every 5 balloons or so. Once you are finished adding all of the balloons and tassels, you can weave in faux flowers and palm leaves. They usually come with wired stems which makes it easy to wrap around the centers and hide behind balloons. I actually added those in AFTER we hung the balloon garland. (Made it much easier!)
Raising a little girl has been so drastically different than raising my boys, and I am thankful for the carefree spunky spirit she brings to our days. I am totally okay compromising my favorite color blue for her pink as long as I get many more days with this blue eyed, freckle cheeked, strong willed gal. Happiest birthday to our Veronica Rose. Thankful to God for dreaming up such a bright spirit to impact our lives for the better.
