Party in the Park

my daughter's 4th birthday bash

I wanted to go simple and I believe I succeeded.  The first glitch came about a month ahead of time when Annabel's teacher decided to use my idea for an end of school year party.  She had no idea that I had planned the same thing for my daughters birthday but I worried for a brief moment that this would ruin things.  Another mom told me not to worry, she'd come-her kids love the park with the water spout.  18 kids later it was obviously still a good idea!

The plan was the county park where there is a water spray play area.  It cost $1 a person to get in, and without offering to pay that back I still got 18 kids, roughly 10 families.  There are picnic tables at this spot in the park and I got there around 30 minutes early to pick my tables. 

We spent some time putting down purple table cloth, a line of finger foods, the cake and 2 princess beach pails filled with flower foam to hold my chocolate dipped marshmallows on a stick (awesome).

I had out these cheap little frisbees, a water gun and a box full of water balloons-the kids had a blast.

 my husband and another father filling water balloons.

The party favors were simple as well.  An idea I pulled of another website, possibly Martha Stewart-simple brown bags with a personalized clip for closure-girls got butterflies and boys got fish.  I added the personalized tag.  Simply scanned in my daughter's signature and added a few lines of text from there.  I used photoshop, but one could easily use MS Word or any word/graphics program.

these were stuffed with pencils, paper, stickers, erasers, tattoos-a vacuum's dream.  

Each kid took home a water gun and frisbee as well.

We spent less than $100 on finger food, all in total the party probably cost $150.  My daughter had a blast, friends stayed late-a good time was had by all.  It's a party I'll probably repeat again until she complains.

all systems down

whew...

I had big plans to update this blog over the holiday weekend, for the first time ever we had nothing planned at all.  Friday night the computer crashes and its a hardware issue, neither one of us geeks are very proficient in hardware so we called on the local computer store who a few hundred later replaced the motherboard (major computer part for the non-geek).  We have it back by Saturday night, but our router dies--only it masks itself as more hardware issues.  Here we are on Weds and its the first time I've been able to get online from our desktop. Still can't get on from our laptop.

It's also the first time I didn't panic over a computer crash.  My files are stored on an external drive, its kind of a nice feeling (although I'm certain I should back up said external drive sooner rather than later).  Other than a slight annoyance of not being able to hop on the computer any ole time (and ok, the fix was not free), this was the least painful computer issue we've ever had to endure.

So another month where I start with a promise to myself to post more.  I have test driven several other blog crafts and recipes, and I've even taken photographic evidence.  Time just does not allow me to play but I see a break coming up.  

And yes, this means another promise to you my nonexistent reader that I will post more soon.