Maia's Fairy Birthday

Maia recently had her 5th birthday party and it was a big one, let me tell ya. Poor Elsie had heard us talking about Maia's birthday for so long, that everything she saw that she wanted she would say "It's for my birthday Mom." She still says that, it's so funny! Anyway, Maia wanted to have a Fairy birthday party, so that's what we did. We started making the list of who she wanted to invite, and somehow it kept growing and growing. I thought for sure that some of the girls wouldn't be able to come, so I let her invite everyone that she wanted to. Welllll...all but ONE came. So we had FIFTEEN little fairies running around here. It was chaos in a good way and Maia was in heaven. My friend Tiffany and I stayed up SOOOO late the night before getting ready. Like 3:30am late. I couldn't have done it without her!! Thank you so much Tiffany! She helped me get all the decorations set up, figure out how to arrange everything, and all the other last minute stuff. It's just always nice to have a second opinion on things and an extra set of hands. And I will apologize now for the overload of pictures, but hey, this party was kind of a big deal:)

Here's how the party went: The girls arrived and we ate a very fairy lunch...The pictures don't even do the decorations justice!! It looked so magical and pretty. (just try to block out my ugly kitchen in the background:) The girls loved it.
Peanut butter sandwiches sprinkled with a little fairy dust:)
Pink marshmellows and grapes and wafer cookies...
Eating lunch outside ( I was so thankful the weather was nice enough to go outside!)
After lunch, we split the girls into 3 groups and they rotated through 3 stations
1. Pin the Wand on the Fairy

2. Don't eat the Fairy! game
3. Face painting


Then they came back together in one big group and we held the "Fairy Coronation" meeting, where they each came up to the front of the room, received a new "fairy" name, a set of wings, a sprinkle of fairy dust, and a fairy crown. Then the were real fairies.
Here they are waiting for the coronation to start..
The wings, and chair where they would be dubbed a real fairy...
David was in charge of the sprinkling of fairy dust and the placement of the crown...
They each got a card that showed their new fairy name and their picture taken in the fairy chair:) Maia likes to pull this funny face....
After they had become real fairies, they had a little parade in our backyard where they marched around the yard and chanted "I Believe in Fairies!" It was so funny.
Then they came in for cupcakes and ice cream..
This was Maia's birthday cupcake from this local cake store here. Super delish (it was a pumpkin spice cupcake) I was really happy when she didn't want to finish the whole thing:)
Then it was time for presents...I love how excited everyone gets! Maia definitely got lots and lots of fun new things! I'm thankful that she shares so well with Elsie or it would have been a hard day for little Elsie Belsie.
Then it was time to go home, whew!! Here are the party favors they went home with: a little bottle of fairy dust (glitter of course! The parents loved me I'm sure of it haha!)
and an edible rice krispy fairy wand...
Now if you've made it this far, I'm impressed and I'm sure you're exhausted!! Can you imagine how tired I was after it was all over??? But it was so worth it. Later that day, Maia just came up to me out of no where and gave me a big hug and said "Thank you for my birthday party Mom." She is such a sweetheart and I'm glad she had such a fun day. I sure love that girl!

On her real birthday, we started it out with breakfast in bed. You may think this is a really lame breakfast, but believe me, it was just what she wanted. I let my kids pick "junk" cereal for their birthday. She had been thinking about it for weeks. Every time we went to the grocery store, she would look at the cereal and think about what kind she was going to pick for her birthday. It was a tough decision, but she ended up going with Fruit Loops.
Maia's big birthday present this year was a new bike. She needed one so bad! We found this one and fell in love with it immediately. It is a little big, but she can actually ride it really well (I was really skeptical, but David kept telling me she would be able to do it and she did!) And plus, it gives her plenty of room to grow into it.

My girl is 5 years old. Wow. She is growing up too fast.

Earrings!!

Maia has been talking about getting earrings for quite some time now. David and I have gone back and forth about whether or not to let her get them now or wait til she's a bit older. We finally decided that she could get the pierced for her 5th birthday. She was sooooo excited. She was counting down the days til she got her earrings. We went to the mall the week before her birthday...this was the "before" picture we took.

And I have yet to take an "after" picture:) She LOVES them though. She cried when she got them done (the pictures are on my phone and I somehow need to get them on here...) but the tears didn't last long and she was all smiles the rest of the day. She wanted to tell EVERYONE about it, so she did! Friends, family, strangers...didn't matter...you were going to know she just got her ears pierced!! She looks so grown up now!

Halloween

Halloween was an ORDEAL this year. Seriously. I was so over it by the time we were done with everything!! It was the costume changes that were killing me. Here's the story...Maia has been liking Pippi Longstocking lately. So we talked about her being Pippi for Halloween. I loved Pippi as a kid and so I was sooo excited when she really, really wanted to be Pippi. Up until this point, I have never really put much effort into a Halloween costume. I mean, every year the girls have wanted to be a princess of some sort, so I just sent them to the dress up closet and let them pick what they wanted to wear. But this year, I did some work...not a lot, but still!! So we bought a red wig, I braided hangers and pipe cleaners into it to make it stand up and I hand sewed on some patches on a jumper, found some good tights, painted on some freckles and there we had the cutest Pippi around!! These pictures were taken before Maia's preschool party and I'm so glad I got them because little did I know.....(see continued story below)
So then our ward trunk-or-treat rolls around on the Saturday before Halloween and we are getting ready to go. Elsie finds the unicorn costume in our bin of costumes and is beyond excited to be the unicorn. All of a sudden Maia gets extremely jealous and doesn't want to be Pippi anymore, SHE wants to be the unicorn. I tell her "No, Elsie picked that..blah..blah..blah" and tell her she is being Pippi. Then she wants to be Aurora. I try to reason with her. We talk. We argue. I am determined that she is going to be Pippi. Finally David says to me, "Cres, does it really matter??" and in my head I'm saying, "YESSSS it does!!!" but I give in. Or we (kind-of) compromise. She will be Ariel, that way she will still get use out of the $16 wig I bought, and then I will let her be the unicorn for the real Halloween day of trick-or-treating. So Maia is Ariel, Elsie is the unicorn, and Mason is the cutest little pumpkin I ever did see. (We were running so late because of the costume ordeal, I didn't get pictures!!)


Now on to actual Halloween...Maia jumps right into the (too small) Unicorn costume, overjoyed with excitement. Elsie is going to be Ariel. So we get all dressed up. Then the wig starts bugging her and she doesn't like the costume. And I'm rolling my eyes and trying to not get super frustrated as I send her back to the costume bin to pick out yet another costume.
She decides on a witch and away we go. Seriously though. What an ordeal. Mason is the only one who didn't cause trouble!!

Pumpkin Patch

Fall time is pumpkin patch time, that's all there is to it. I had never been to one until we moved to Buffalo. We went every year to the Great Pumpkin Farm there and now I can't imagine a fall without a pumpkin patch of some sort. This one did not even COMPARE to the one in good ol' Buffalo, but it was perfect for what I felt like doing that day. David had to work this Saturday (my LEAST, LEAST favorite thing about his job!! He works every other Saturday..) but I wasn't going to let that stop me from taking the kids to do something fun. The weather was perfect and we had a really good time. There was a corn maze, a hay ride, slides, petting zoo animals...

And my personal favorite...a horse drawn trailer ride. I love how Elsie's arm is around the back of the seat like this...so funny!




After we had all our fun, we picked out a few pumpkins to take home to carve into jack-o-lanterns. Overall a really fun day!