For Maida's third birthday, I decided that I would try to throw her a big birthday bash in celebration of her golden birthday. Originally I wanted to do a ladybug party, Erik wanted a dinosaur party, and Maida just didn't know what she wanted. Eventually I realized that most of Maida's friends were boys, so I tried to go a more gender-neutral route. Erik came up with a pirate theme, but after we talked about it more and more, Maida informed us that she didn't like it because "Pirates are scaaaareeeeyyy." So, that's when I got the idea of having a pirate and fairy party. I convinced Maida that it would be great and that she could be Tinkerbell, a fairy princess. After more brainstorming, I came up with a costume for Skogen to be Peter Pan, and a thrift store shopping trip provided materials for me to make Erik a Captain Hook costume. I also purchased fairy costumes for all of the little girls and pirate costumes for all of the little boys. To my surprise, though, on party day not many of the boys were interested in the pirate costumes! But most of the little girls liked to wear their wings and carry around their princess wands.
60 guests joined us in our backyard that we transformed into Never Never Land and called "Scharrer Cove". We had the "Fresh Catch Diner," where the cake, snacks, and drinks were served, along with "Treasure City," where we had a kiddie pool filled with sand and buried treasures for a treasure hunt. It was a very cool, rainy day, so we had a campfire going most of the day, which seemed to take the chill off. Erik finished setting up Maida's playground just an hour before the party (he also worked on it until 4:00 in the morning the night before!) and the kids really seemed to love playing on the playground. We did have one game of "Pin the Patch on the Pirate," but had to cancel our bean bag toss through the pirate's mouth because it looked like it was going to rain any minute and we wanted to make sure and eat cake before the rain came. To our surprise, the rain held off and we had a wonderful afternoon.
Thank you to everyone who joined us and for all of the presents for Maida. She has never ever ever received that many gifts at once! Every day since the party, we have taken out another couple toys to explore and Maida says, "I can't believe that I have so many friends." Thank you, again.
Here's a video that I put together of the day. My Uncle Gary took over 200 pictures of the party, so it was really hard to pick and choose pictures to go into the video. If you would like to see more of the pictures from the day, I posted all of the pictures to: http://scharrerfamily.shutterfly.com/. (By the way, I'm trying out a new online video service. YouTube kept taking my videos offline without warning me and it was making me upset. So, I'm going to try Vimeo and see if that helps.) You will have to turn the sound all the way up to hear the music - for some reason it's really quiet. Also, if you double click on the video, it should go to full screen. Enjoy!
She is getting SO big.
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