Preparations for a Party

So lately Katelee has REALLY developed a mind of her own.  Particularly in regards to her birthday that is coming up.  

Soon after Christmas I began talking about her birthday because, let's face it, I LOVE birthdays and I like to make a big deal of them.  Usually I can plant ideas in her head that she likes and will take as her own, and so it is easy for me to make the decisions and for Katelee to go along with them.  But not this time!  From the day I first mentioned her birthday, she just knew exactly what her birthday was going to be like.  All of her friends were going to come over to our house and they were going to, "run and around and jump and be super heroes."  Friends?  Where did she get an idea like that?  Isn't three a little young for a friend party?  However, Katelee has been to four or five birthday parties (that must be where she got the idea from), and so I started to get excited about the idea, too.   

We started to discuss a theme.  I suggested we could have a princess party, since Katelee has been very interested in Disney princesses lately.  She did like that idea for about a week, but then went back to her original super hero idea.  And she has been talking about her super hero party now for over a month, so I guess a super hero party it is!  (She did suggest, repeatedly and determinedly that we have a princess party for Gerald, though.  Hee hee.)

I set a goal for myself to not spend more than $30 on her friend party, and I have succeeded in staying under that amount. As a result, however, we went to a lot more work! Believe it or not, it has actually been fun.  We found some inexpensive material and ribbon and made a pile of super hero capes for the kids.  It was some work, but fun, too, and I figured I ended up spending about 75 cents per cape - not bad!  

Gerald used his amazing art skills to make the "pin the mask on the superhero" poster.  He spent Saturday afternoon working on it and I think it looks amazing!  Much better than anything I could have done.  And we have plans to make a homemade pinata - we'll let you know how that goes.

The most stressful part so far has been deciding who to invite and how many kids to invite.  We live in a ward with LOTS and LOTS of little ones, and so Katelee has like 30 little friends.  I couldn't handle a party that big, though, so in the end, we didn't invite too many guests - only the kids in our cul-de-sac and the other few kids from the ward that Katelee plays with on a very regular basis.  And I also invited moms, for my own sanity.  Here are the invitations that we made.  Sorry it's crooked - it's my scanner's fault. Katelee picked out which super hero girl to put on the front:

She has been very opinionated about other things, too.  For example, her cake.  She absolutely insisted that it be brown (chocolate) with white frosting.  Okay, babe - it's your party!  I made the cake Saturday.  I know it's huge, but we are going to use it both for our family get-together and for our friend party.  I'm really happy with how it turned out; it actually looks exactly how I pictured it - and that never happens!

And her presents.  Honestly, I wasn't even really going to ask her what she wanted.  It's more fun to just surprise her and she's still too little to know about most toys out there.  But when the topic of gifts came up one day, she informed us that she just knew that she was getting a guitar and "the little princess dolls" for her birthday.  My thoughts were: "GUITAR?  How do you even know what a guitar is?"  and "Argggh, I really don't like those little princess dolls!"  (By little princess dolls, she means those plastic princess figurines that are about 4 inches tall and have tiny rubbery clothing that can be changed.  I don't like them because Katelee cannot change the clothes herself, and so I spend most of the day constantly changing the clothes back and forth, and because they have about a million teeny, tiny pieces that get lost so easily.  I know this because she had one of them once, but most of the pieces are lost now.)  Anyway, we tried, ever so subtly, to change her mind.  We suggested BIGGER princess dolls, and many other ideas, but she was absolutely sure with all the faith of her child heart that she was getting precisely what she had told us.  Gerald and I went birthday shopping for our date night this past week; I bet you can guess exactly what we bought her.  I will admit, though, the guitar is really cute.