Bollywood Dance Party

My older daughter will be turning 10 soon. She wants to celebrate with a 'Bollywood Dance Party' (such a good Indian, her dad is proud). So I scoured the internet for some ideas. Living in the middle of nowhere (with almost no other Indians in the area) makes it hard to find some of the stuff we want, like an Indian dance teacher. But, we persevered and have come up with some fun things. Here is our inspiration board. I'll be back later once we get things more put together with party specifics.

Airplane Party Printables

I like to make the printables for a party, but I know that not everyone else does. So, I'm giving you mine to use if you like. The above picture is what I made. I have taken out the 'airline' name to give you a blank picture to print. I used orange and blue colors because it's easy to find orange things this time of year and blue is a good complimentary color for it, but you can change the colors of any of the items to suit your needs.
Clicking on the photo will get you to the download, or CLICK HERE.

Update: A few people have asked about how to change the colors, so I made a list of tutorial links to help with that. 

Airplane Birthday Party for a 5 year old

My second child turned 5 last week. He loves airplanes (like his daddy, who is in the Air Force). So, we had an airplane themed party. I got lots of ideas around the internet, especially on Pinterest (love that site!). Here is what we did:
I decorated in blue and orange. There was a bunting made of paper airplanes (my hubby made them), balloon clouds, and a small backdrop of cloud fabric I had in my stash. I made signage for check-in, food court, restroom, and baggage claim. It was cute.

As the kids came, they colored some luggage tags (from Oriental Trading).

They played "find the planes in the clouds". We put some small toy planes in a box of packing peanuts and let the kids dig around for them. Then they played with the planes for a bit.


Put together and decorated some foam gliders (from Oriental Trading) and flew those for a bit. While they played I got things cleaned up for lunch, our in-flight meal.
In the lunch boxes was a sandwich (choice of turkey or ham), some orange slices and some chips. They also got some Sky Jello (recipe found here...except I used store bought Cool Whip instead of whipping my own cream). We had some little servings of Cheez-its, Goldfish crakcers, blue jelly beans, and blue chocolate covered pretzels. And there were water bottles with our little printed labels on them.

After lunch they played for a bit and then wanted cake and ice cream. I used a Wilton shaped pan for the airplane cake. I think it turned out pretty good (and tasty).After cake came presents and more playing. When it was time for the guests to go, we gave them a goody bag/box and a marshmallow propeller pop to go. The goody box had some aviator sunglasses, a paratrooper toy, bubbles, york peppermint pattie bites (blue and white), orange gummies, and a plane made of candy (found here). And they also got to take home their luggage tag and foam glider.

Everyone seemed to have lots of fun. Now on to the other 3 birthdays this fall (we have lots of fall birthdays in my family).

Airplane Party Invitations

My son will be turning 5 in the fall and will be having an airplane themed birthday party. I've made some invitations that look like boarding passes (name and info have been changed, of course).


I am sharing the blank template with you for free. If you want it, just click the photo. Also, you can get a personalized barcode from several free places online (if you want to add that to the invite, like in the example). It'd be cute if it said 'Ben is five' or something.

Mod Monkey Invitation Template

A few days ago, on a message board, someone wanted to make a 1st birthday invitation with a 'mod monkey' theme for her twins. She was wanting some design help. After looking up this theme online, I did these templates. The gray areas are for inserting pictures. And the fonts I used were free, so I included the names so you could match the font when making your invites with these templates. Just put in your pictures, add the information on the party and print. The first one comes in both singular and plural (for multiples) They are 4x6, at 300ppi so they can be printed at any major photo printing outlet.
Download them here

Here is what the 1st template looks like:

Here are my demo's for all three.

Birthday Time

So my kids both had their birthdays recently. I enjoy baking and decorating cakes, so I did just that for each of their birthdays. Here are the pictures:


This is for my 1 year-old. His nursery is all in a frog theme, so was the baby shower he got when I was pregnant.




My now 5 year-old wanted a Halloween birthday party. We did a spider theme with the colors purple and black. This is the haunted house cake she wanted (for some reason she refused to have a spider cake).