A fabulous fairy garden and pancake party

My daughter turned nine and decided she wanted to have a pancake party for her birthday. When I asked her what she'd like to do with her friends, she wasn't too sure. She has a mixed group of friends, some from when she was younger in daycare and others she goes to school with now. So after much discussion, we came up with the idea to have a "fairy garden planting and pancake party". Sounds fabulous and fun, right?

We shopped and picked out small birdhouses at the craft stores in various shapes and sizes. Michaels and AC Moore have them for $1 each, and we used 50% off coupons to get them for just $0.53 each after tax. We also picked up special acrylic paint and a spray polyurethane to keep the paint from washing away in the rain.

In the weeks leading up to the party, we collected small twigs from the yard, clipped them into even smaller pieces and hot-glued them into little fairy benches and chairs. We realized we wouldn't have too much time during the party for everyone to build their own chairs, and goodness gracious I couldn't imagine working with a hot glue gun during the chaos, I mean party. So it was nice to lay out all the designs we hand-crafted and let each of the girls select their own.

The morning of the party, Mr O. worked as our chef on the griddle, in charge of making chocolate chip, blueberry, a mix of both and "just plain" pancakes. We created a pancake toppings bar in the middle of the table, complete with butter, fresh strawberries and blueberries, bananas, chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles and syrup.

For a cake we stacked sprinkle-filled pancakes, poured a glaze on top and then placed 9 candles on top. This ended up being gobbled up by Mr. O., myself and my awesome partner-in-crime, Karyn. She's incredibly crafty and so very helpful when planning parties.

Here's a few pictures of the girls' masterpieces. They painted and drew on rocks, used blue glass stones as water - some created ponds, while others made streams, and then painted their houses and selected different flowers and plants to include in their gardens.

The girls had so much fun and then got to take their gardens home to plant in their real gardens. I loved doing this craft with them, and loved even more just watching their creativity come out while they worked on theirs.