Pretty Tough Tea Party

I love organising parties. In fact I’m pretty sure this is my real calling!  

This is probably because I like to go overboard!

It is like performing an unrestricted version of my planning job only with a smaller budget; in most cases!

For Inny’s 3^rd birthday we hired a small church hall and a clown and the whole nursery attended (36! and parents).  The ‘Aunty mafia’ (my ex’s three sisters! A LV wielding set of identical twins and another who is pretty much identical to the other two lol) had a face painting table and there were 3 long games of pass the parcel. My brother M was in charge of Piñata and drove the kids crazy with his on stage version of ‘there was an old woman who swallowed a fly’ as well as his impromptu fall on his backside. The kids found it very funny while he held back an agonising howl of pain!

I caught this on video and shall route it out for your enjoyment!

For Inny’s 5^th birthday we threw a pirate, monsters and princess themed party and held it at a local hall. My brothers were dressed as Zorro, a ghoul, and a 6’3 Spiderman. Leala & her lovely boyfriend came as pirates and I was a witch (of course). We had a bouncy castle and an entertainer called Ziggy.

Ziggy bought with him bubble and snow machines and a well of energy that quite frankly was exhausting!!

For her 7^th birthday we stayed at home and invited just 15 kids. I booked an animal show. By now word had got around school that Inny’s parties were pretty cool so 22 or so kids turned up and all but 3 parents decided to stay for the party!!

2 owls, 1 snake, 2 skunks, 1 pygmy hedgehog, a tarantula, a giant millipede, a lizard kept the whole lot entertained for over 2 hours!

This year, year 8, I opted for something small and girly. A tea party! How hard could that be? After much negotiation with the celebrant we settle on inviting 8 little ladies (and I made it very clear that tag along siblings/parents were not invited!). Daddy was engaged as the butler and granny and auntie K were asked to come along for momma-moral support.

I started off by buying a length of fabric from Ikea to cover the tables and then I trawled eBay for the cake stands and the unique party ‘bags’.  I popped into Oxfam’s Dalston branch and bought lots of lovely little tea cups and saucers for the hot chocolate and marsh mellows (instead of tea).

Inny and I had a practice run at making cup cakes the weekend before and they were lovely but come the weekend of the party I was just too busty to make them. I took a trip to our local Tesco and found they had a lovely selection of cupcakes at £2 for 4!!!!!

The dress code was fascinators, tea dresses and gloves and everyone made a lovely effort to dress the part!

The butler turned up an hour late and the young ladies called for him to be sacked ‘or at the very least not be paid!’ The game of Twister descended in to chaos and there was an unpleasant punching incident between two young ladies.

But over all the four hour party was a great success with lots of laughter and fun. It was so super worth it to see my little miss having so much fun with her friends!