Ava's Painting Party

This year's bday theme was painting, since it is one of Ava's true loves :)
Odd angle, but the fruit tray includes all the colors of the rainbow. The rest of the menu included: fair sized hot dogs (they were huge!), different colored ketchup and mustard with paint brushes to paint onto the hotdogs, a salad (that also had every color of the rainbow), chips and dip (again, had a chip for every color), potato salad (my grandma,"you can't have a party without potato salad"), and my Aunt Kay's baked beans (she knows that baked beans is one of the things I've been craving with this pregnancy- along with corn on the cob :) )

I just have to point out the shirt. I found this on a clearance rack last year and saved it for this year's party. Yes, I know the themes way in advanced. Hey, that's how you get the best deals, and yes I already have something in mind for next year but not set in stone yet.

I made all of the cupcakes (along with Ava's help). Since Ava's favorite color is red, she got one cupcake heaped with frosting for each year :) I then set up a "decoration station" for everyone to decorate their own cupcakes. The "paint can" was filled with all different kinds of sprinkles. The "paint cans" were made from the giant economy sized canned goods that schools use (I have my connections :) ). They held all of the silverware, sprinkles, napkins, and wet wipes.

Not to brag, but didn't they turn out awesome!?

This is when the rain started to pour. I was hoping it would miss us, but no luck. Thankfully, my grandma has huge trees in her yard, so everyone stayed dry (until the end). One of the kid's activities was a squirt gun fight. Not just any squirt gun fight, though. Each kid (and some adults) put on a white tshirt and chased after each other with their squirters that were filled with....paint! A little background story, we decided to test this out a couple of weeks before hand to make sure it would work. Well, the paint looked great on the shirts but didn't look so great stained on Ava's skin for a week. The worst was her blue splattered face that she sported for the week. So, more testing had to be done, and I'm happy to say all of the children washed clean in the rain :). The shirts turned out really cool too. The kids ran around painting each other for a couple of hours.

Another activity, that I didn't get because of the rain and me rushing to get everything in, was finger painting. I covered a buffet table with paper. Did you know that you can get the end rolls of the newspaper from the newspaper company for free or really cheap? Who knew? The day before I made finger paints of every color. We spooned them all out into bowls and let the kids have at it. Our youngest guests, 10 months, particularly enjoyed this.

All in all, this was a great party. I'm just bummed that it got rained out. Our parties usually last around six hours. What can I say, our family knows how to have fun. We promised all of the kids that we would have a "do over day" on a nice day to do squirt guns, finger paint, and swimming. Well, better start planning for next year's party :)