THE Party

So, In case you didn't know, High School Musical is the coolest movie ever. And in direct correlation to this fact, was selected by G as the theme for her party this year. I thought that i could probably pretty easily pull that off since every aisle you turn down in wal-mart these days seem to contain HSM themed products. And don't get me wrong, this did work to my advantage in terms of paper goods and party favors, but not so much in the party-game-ideas-for-4-year-olds area. So, I turned to the information super highway in search of ideas. Apparently, normal 4-year-olds are not the target audience of HSM because every thing I found was ideas for a 'pre-teen' party, which G may think she is, but in fact, is not (refer to the last pic on this post). So, I turned to my sister, Alicia, who has no children, but I think might be actually be a child trapped in an adult's body. I went to the right place because she had about 50 ideas for me in a matter of minutes. I couldn't have pulled it off without her. This is a little game I like to call "get your head in the game". All of you HSM fans will know what I'm talking about. The idea was that they divide up into teams by color and whoever gets the most balloons of their appointed color into the 'b-ball hoop' (aka trash bag taped to hula-hoop) wins. Well, that was my idea anyways. Their idea was a)popping balloons and/or b) shoving balloons (and not their appointed colors, mind you) into the basket until they could get it filled so that J would dump them back out onto their heads.

G and D getting down during a round of "freeze-dance", my personal favorite of the party games.

Oh, the cake. This was the big stressor for me. Which I mostly brought on myself. I could have easily gone to any grocery store and ordered a perfectly made HSM cake. But for some reason, I feel that my children's birthday cakes must be homemade or they will think that I don't love them. Here's how the conversation went with G when I presented her with her homemade full-of-love HSM birthday cake:
Me: (enthusiastically) What do you think G?!
G: (short pause)What do you think, mommy?
Me: (Nervous laughter) I think it's great!
G: (long pensive pause) Well, it doesn't look very good, but I think it will taste really good!
She's very concerned about others feelings. She almost always follows a put-down by a compliment. Gotta love her for that.

If I learned anything from this experience, it's that you need more than 2 games at a 2 hour children's party. Here they are playing a variation on ring around the rosies to fill time.

Wow, they were excited about opening presents. I mean, wow.

G and a few party-goers in front of the HSM banner that i painted for them to do their HSM karaoke in front of. Took me 10 minutes to paint, yet got better reviews from G than the cake did. I would attribute this to the massive amounts of glitter glued to the banner. She likes sparkly things. Maybe that's what my cake was missing, a little bling.

So, overall, I think the party was a success. However, my mom emailed me with a bit of advice today. She said that you should invite the number of guests according to the child's age. In this case, 4. Last count I had was 13 party guests. And yes, I said today she emailed it to me. Seems like the kind of advice you give someone before a party.