November 8, 2009

And now she is 4

Lara turned 4 on Saturday and we had a blowout in her honor. Here she is in the first of the day's three outfits, most revolving around this fairy dress that was thematically repurposed to fit with the party's theme: Princesses and Pirates.



I assembled four random images found through Google into this invitation graphic...



...which I also blew up to be a face-in-the-hole photo op thing. Gus and Lara demonstrate the awesomeness:



Pirate hats and princess crowns for one and all!



Jakey reminisces about pirate days gone by:



The balloons started as decorations on the wall, but were quickly cannibalized into a super fun stampede-cum-dance:



Juliet rocks all the available the accessories:



Here, the gaggle of children fresh from the balloon madness are calmed by the pull-string pinata. I love that they were raising their hands for turns! I filled the pinata with gold- and silver-foiled candy, some pieces of eight, and bejeweled rings.... a theme that was pretty much only picked up on by my friend Sheri (and thus was worth it!).



I also used the invitation images to decorate the cupcakes (by printing out the pictures and gluing them onto toothpicks). Lara was totally overwhelmed when everyone was singing "Happy Birthday" - look at this face:



And here, a cupcake closeup:



Ah, what a totally wonderful, exhausting, somewhat dreamlike day! I still can't quite believe we have a four year-old... but I know that every day she is a exhilarating, baffling, joyful, awe-inspiring, maddening, terribly beloved creature. Happy Birthday, little girl!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Face in the hole - brilliant!

mwg said...

Happy B-day wonderful Lara! Awesome party! All the things that you made are absolutely wonderful!!!

Amy said...

Happy Birthday Lara! My son was 4 on the 8th and his best buddy shares Lara's b-day-we are wiped from birthday excitement! I always enjoy visiting your site to see how Lara is growing and comparing it to Louis (girls and boys are so different,as you are learning already, I'm sure!) happy Birthday!

Karen said...

I'm not sure when I started visiting your blog (a year or more ago?) but Lara has grown so much since then! What a beautiful little girl she is!
Happy belated Birthday!

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Great Party ideas. I wanted to know how did you do the cardboard cutout. How did you get such a large image printed?

Anna said...

Hi Anonymous -

Great question! I used Photoshop to blow up the image to the right dimensions and then printed it out on many, many 8.5x11 pieces of printed paper, which I then arranged one next to the next and glued down on a big piece of posterboard. I looked into getting it printed at Kinko's or something and it would have been $150! Too much. This was probably more like $20.