Preparing for Alli's Birthday Party

With Alli getting older, preparing for her birthday is a little more difficult.  This year, she changed her mind at least 3 times on what she wanted the theme to be, and at least 3 times on where it would be.  With a bit of prodding from mommy, the final decision is our house with a butterfly theme.  Whew!

So, I went looking for some butterfly invitations.  I figured we could make them.  Why not!  She likes to color.  So I found a couple of examples and printed them out for her.  She chose one, but she didn't want to color, she wanted *that one*.  So I showed her a fancy trick.  I covered up all the letters with a blank piece of paper and then made a copy.  She loved it!  So then we hand-wrote our own information and she proceeded to make enough copies for everyone she was going to invite.

As we were going through her list of friends, she kept adding more and more.  I was a little worried about size since the party was going to be at our house and we were inviting school friends now (not just our regular parent friends that don't mind squeezing and helping!)  So I said "Alli, you can invite all those kids if you like, but I'm going to tell them no presents.  Or, you can invite a small number of friends and I'll let them bring presents."  And her answer?  "I want presents mommy, so we'll just invite a few friends."  :)  Hmmm...  Like she doesn't have enough toys!!  We settled on 8 friends.

So now we had our list of friends and our invitations.  I grabbed just plain letter sized envelopes and told her we were going to use those for the invitations.  First she put the name of each friend on each envelope.  Then I showed her how to fold the paper into thirds to fit into the envelope.  That was all she needed.  She was off - folding her invitations and stuffing the envelopes.  At one point she had Molly help, and here's how:  "Molly, I will fold the invitations and put them in the envelopes.  And then I'll peel this paper off the envelope to stick it, and you throw the paper in the trash and then put the invitation on the counter.  We will pretend to be a machine."  Are you kidding?  My daughter at 4-1/2 is a process engineer!!!  hahahaha

So our invitations are done.  They are not glamorous by any means, but they are very much Alli'.  Here is a cool picture of the few we had to mail (the blacked out parts are the addresses I had to add - Kim didn't want to post any personal information to the web!)