Abbi's Birthday

Abbi turned 7 on May 5.  Cinco de Mayo.  She has a cool birth date, 05/05/2005.  Alas, we've missed our chance for that to ever be possible to happen again.  We'd have to be pregnant already to get a baby by 12/12/2012.  Oh well. 

Abbi's party did not quite go as planned.  In recent years, I've gotten away from doing parties at home or doing them myself.  It's a lot less stressful and fun for the parents to just pay someone else to do it.  However, this year, Abbi and I came up with the idea of having a camping party.  It was going to be so cute!  I spent some time looking up ideas on the internet and found quite a few that I thought were doable.  I was getting so excited about doing her party. 

To start, I made these really cute invitations.  I usually just do evites these days because it's easier to get prompt RSVPs that way, but when I saw this idea on the Pinterest, I couldn't resist.

Our plan was to have the party at this nearby park.  It's a relatively small park but plenty big for what we wanted to do.  It's just an area with 2 open fields and lots of space to run around.  There is this really big fire pit there that we were going to roast hot dogs and marshmallows over.  We were going to set up the tent, have a scavenger hunt,  a three legged race and do a craft. 

However...after worrying about the weather all day, which turned out to be great, when we got to the location to set up for the party, my jaw dropped, literally.  There were at least 100 people there having their own party.  Keep in mind that I had booked this location about a month before. One of the 2 fields was packed full of cars and the other of people.  There was screaming going on in my head at this point.  And then when Abbi realized what was happening, crying from her. 

So we raced home, contacted all the party goers and frantically set up to have the party at our house.  As it ended up, we didn't get to do a lot of the things I had planned, like the tent or the fire or the race. But all the kids, and Abbi especially, seemed to have a good time.  There was still cake and presents and friends.  Oh, and a pinata.  Since her birthday is on Cinco de Mayo (and she likes to tell people this all the time), we thought we should have a pinata.  So I found this really cute one shaped like a tent.  There was no place to hang it in our yard, so we had to get creative, but the candy still came out and then there was a mad dash by 14 little girls. 

So, Happy Birthday, Ab.  Sorry it didn't go as planned but I'm glad it was still fun. 


These were the goody bags.  We made hobo bags out of sticks we found in the yard and bandannas.  We put the goodies inside the bandannas.

This is a smores snack that went home in the goody bags.  It's made of golden grahams cereal, mini marshmallows and chocolate chips.





Abbi taking a swing at the pinata.  I thought I took a picture of the pinata before we hung it up but I can't find it, so you'll just have to imagine how cute it was if you can't tell from here.

The Cake.  Costco.  Love Costco cakes.  They are HUGE, very tasty and CHEAP!

Abbi and her friends