We had a golden birthday over here this month, so *luckily* it was also the year of the friend party.  I would have probably caved on the sleepover if it wasn’t the year she could have her friends over (we have an every other year policy).  I’m not a totally mean mom. 😉

So, what to do, what to do…

I searched on Pinterest to find some activities for the girls to do before pizza and movies.  The came over around 4pm, so here was the docket of the day:

#1 Operation paint faces – I pulled up Google images for cat face painting, and the girls chose the design and colors they wanted me to do.  I got pretty close, and only had a few modifications after some mirror action went down.

#2 Find the Prey game – Basically, I just hid some of her stuffed animals in the yard, and they ran around for 10 minutes finding them.  I made sure to count them as I put them out, since, Lord knows, we would have found some after a nice rainstorm otherwise.  Whomever got the most got a prize.  As we only had three girls, everyone got a prize, but they got to choose what they wanted in the order of most “captured”.  Birthday girl was outtie on this game, though, she got the most.

#3 Make cat toys for the local Humane Association.  I cannot find where I printed off the instructions to make fleece cat toys from their website.  It was a really simple project and they each made around 2+ cat toys out of fleece.  They tried them out on our cat.  As they woke her up from a nap, she was rather unimpressed but hopefully the shelter cats will be more appreciative.

#4 Cat adoptions.  I was unable to find stuffed cats at Target (really??), but luckily the local grocery store had a flowers/gift area where I found the cats.  A bit more than I wanted to spend, but the girls were going to show up in a few hours.  Yes. Last minute, as per recent protocols.

I took out my ribbons and gave them free rein.  I cut out some circular-ish name tags out of foam and attached them to the collars.  The adoption sheet was a free printable I found here.

They were SO EXCITED.  The cats were carried around with them the rest of the night.

#5 That’s all I got.  It was pizza and movies the rest of the night.  Worked for them, and they all stayed up wayyyyyy too late.

We watched a movie after the girls had watched one downstairs, and sent them upstairs to watch ones I had purchased on the Xbox.  They ended up watching some scary tv shows on the iPod.  I know…great parental supervision.   I don’t think they were watching Saw II or anything, but a scary-ish shows for kids (it was on Kid’s Neflix, so geared towards kids, but…).  Well, shortly after I finally got them to settle and get sleeping (which was super late, of course), one of them came in our room and said her tummy hurt.  Tums? Water?  Nope…it didn’t work.  At about 3am I made the call to mom after subsequent, “my tummy really hurts”.  It could have been the shows or the pizza, swedish fish, sour gummy worms, cake… the options are endless!  Well, not surprisingly the mom did not hear the phone call.  I got her back into bed with the promise that we would give it a shot again at 6am.  I barely got any sleep, since I kept waiting and listening for more movements and/or throwing up in the bathroom.  Mom called me a little after 6am.  She had to work her shift (nurse), and had called her husband that was camping with their son 2 hours away to come and get her.  Of course, upon daybreak she was fine and sleeping.

This is why I only do kid parties every other year.  I feel that part of the fun is eating the crap and staying up late.  At 10 they should be able to self police their tummies a bit, I would think.  Of course, my kids aren’t huge sweet eaters.  They like them, but they don’t binge or anything.

Oh well.  Two more years and she can have another party.  Maybe they will be “too old” for parties at that time. *crossing fingers* 😉