DIY Party Planning

One thing that I will fully admit to is that I love planning my daughter's birthday parties!  Each year I decide on a theme and then seek out just the right invitation.  From there we are on to food and decorations and then the big day!  I really do love all the little details and making it an experience for everyone there.  This year for mini chickie the theme was dogs and our backyard was transformed with brown balloons with ears attached, dog bowls for the kids to eat from, and pin the tail on the puppy game!  For our oldest this past weekend was of course the ever favorite, Frozen.  If you haven't seen it or heard of it, pick up that rock your under and check it out.  Each year I say it was my favorite but this year was really it!  I finished and felt like I had gone back to my days on prom committee!  As part of the Elf4Health challenge, our job today is to share an expertise.  Since I'm sure you all don't want to learn about how to teach children that don't speak English, I decided to let you in on a little secret....DIY parties can be really easy to do!!  Let me show you how!

Step 1: Pick a theme...I have taken these ideas either from what our girls are loving in the moment or sometimes what they like.  We've had pumpkin parties, rainbow parties, Elmo, princess, dogs, as well as color themed parties.  Picking the theme will help you with the rest!

Step 2:  Invitation time!  I usually get my invitations on Etsy.  I find those cards that someone will design, send you a pdf, and you print them yourself.  It is super easy and usually costs around $12.  I then send it off to CVS to print but if you have a printer at home that does pictures you can even do that!  Here is the invite we had for our Frozen party from PartyPrintouts on Etsy.

Step 3:  Get your hiney on Pinterest!  I get a lot of my ideas from searching Pinterest and making a board of party ideas.  You can follow mine if you want.  I try to search out food ideas and decor ideas and then find ways to make it myself or make it for less money than some of the other budgets are!  The Frozen theme was easy to pull off this year since my daughter's birthday is so close to Christmas.  I went to all the craft stores and the Dollar Store to find all things silver and blue and snowflakes!

Hubs did the lights and he even found a set of projection lights which basically made the room blue.  The background was a piece of fabric I found at the fabric store that I stapled to the wall and then made the border out of white balloons.  We had fake snow from our houses we display so I rolled it out.  The silver and blue sparkly spires were from Christmas Tree Shop.  I also got the giant snowflakes and crowns at the fabric store too.  I made sure I used my union card for any teacher discounts I could get!  

Step 4: Cake and Food...I hit up Pinterest again for a great cake idea.  I then sent several pictures on to our cake person and she made one that literally looked exactly the same!!  

She did awesome!  Now if you don't want to use a person to do the cake you could always do your own.  I've used YouTube and Pinterest to help me make things like Elmo cupcakes and Princess castles before but this year I wanted to spend more of my energy on the decorations.  For food I kept it simple and did a hot chocolate bar thanks to my amazing family!  I cut out snowflakes and put them on the cups for an added touch!  We did carrots (Olaf's nose), snow covered pretzels (yogurt pretzels), and popcorn cups!

Step 5: Goodie bags...Usually I bake something for the goodie bags but since it is so close to Christmas aka the time of lots of goodies, I decided to do non-food goodies.  I again found snowflake gift bags at the Dollar Store (You could also use blue bags and put snowflakes on yourself) and stuffed them with a pencil and sharpener (snowflakes) and these gloves and ornaments.

Step 6: Plan an activity!  This I have to give 100% credit to my sister who brought the boards, the circle cutouts, and all the supplies to complete snowmen!  The kids had a great time making a masterpiece!  Again for ideas you can always head to Pinterest which has more than enough things to do! 

The girls had a fabulous time and I can honestly say so did I!  Now I have almost a year before it's time to plan another!!  Feel free to ask if you have any questions!!


Do you like to plan parties?  Frozen fan?