Lucky Seven!

My eldest daughter turned seven a couple weeks ago. SEVEN!

6+1!

21/3!

The square root of 49!

She wanted to celebrate with a party theme based on the movie Tinkerbell: Secret of the Wings.

Which, if you haven't seen it (obviously only the very culturally deprived have not), let me explain.

In a nutshell, Tinkerbell discovers that she has a twin sister who lives in the forbidden Winter Woods - forbidden to summer fairies because their wings would freeze and they would never fly again. Ditto to the winter fairies visiting summer, because of the reverse. I'll leave you to puzzle out what they do with that conundrum. (I know you will be running to see the movie now!) But I won't spoil it for you. So basically, it's a summer-meets-winter themed movie.

A little tricky for a party, perhaps, but here we go.

First off, the invitations were epic.

Pretty sure the parents didn't think so, but I did.

Here was the message:

Okay, but it was printed on a really tiny slip of paper, which was rolled up and slipped into a little (*NON-WATERTIGHT - my ultimate downfall*) plastic bag, which was then painstakingly stuffed inside a water balloon, through much backbreaking labor by Travis's cousin Sarah and myself, along with a little sprig of wildflowers, filled with water and then frozen. So, the effect was a ball of ice that was supposed to be shaped like a water droplet (turns out water balloons are not really that shape at all when filled) with a flower inside, and the invitation. (There is a point in the movie where Tinkerbell's sister preserves a flower by surrounding it in a sphere of ice.) So the girls would have to wait for it to melt to read the secret message! Unfortunately I don't have pictures of that.

I thought we were being creative, but the plastic bags definitely leaked, water-logging the invitations to the point of destruction. When we hand-delivered all the chunks of ice, everyone was like, "Oh.... thank you...." and I was like, "Yeah, you probably won't be able to read that. I'll email it to you."

Oh well!

Fairy slippers!

And of course, a treasure hunt!

My mom used to whip up spectacular treasure hunts for our childhood birthday parties. I used to love having a birthday just for the treasure hunt. In fact, I'm kind of considering asking her to whip me up one for my 31st birthday party. Stay tuned. I thought I did all right with this one though. All the clues were riddles written in rhyme. And they were tricky - the girls had to puzzle them out before they could figure out the next location. Like,

"And now it's time to look below

The place where letters come and go!"

Which was, of course, the mailbox. Or,

"This is where you fly so high,

On rope and wood, up to the sky!"

Get it? The swing??? Right.

Mostly I loved watching this little guy tag along as they all ran to find the next clue.

TREASURE!

Gold, silver, and JEWELS!

With which they made beautiful fairy necklaces...

 This cake was going to have actual fairies on it, but we couldn't find them! Of course they turned up a couple days after the party. Um, the top layer is supposed to be summer, and the bottom layer is winter. Use your imagination.

Oh, and the lake. That is glass candy. Blue raspberry. Because despite how it actually may look, I am in reality a confectionary genius. Just trust me on this one.

And now, the saddest part of the day.

Our final activity was supposed to be ice blocking.

The perfect summer-meets-winter activity!

Apparently if you did not grow up in Utah, you probably don't know what ice blocking is.

It's awesome.

You get these big blocks of ice, take them to a grassy hill, and ride them down it, like a sled!

Sledding in the summer! Still involving ice and cold!

I did not realize that this is a very geographic-specific activity, because it turns out Missouri does not sell huge blocks of ice.

I figured this out way too late, and moreover, I came up with our solution way too late. We decided to freezer our OWN ice blocks using a cardboard box lined with plastic garbage bags. It would have worked, too, probably, if I had thought of this more than 24 hours in advance and had given them two or three days to freeze. We tried anyway, but our un-solid ice blocks collapsed when we removed them from the freezer.

I'm not gonna lie - Kate was a little bit devastated.

As was I.

But on the bright side - we did have snow cones!

No pictures of those either, but they were delicious. Travis has a special snow cone making talent. If he was a fairy on Tinkerbell, that would be his talent. Of all the objects in the talent discovery circle, the snow cone would glow.

This one is from our family party on her actual birthday. I just had to chronicle her reaction to one of our gifts - the movie Annie. Clearly not quite what she expected.

Don't worry - we got her presents she liked too.

Happy birthday, sweet Kate!

Enjoy your "lucky seven" year!