Sophia 8th birthday spa party, Part 2

(continued from part 1)

Let's get on with the spa treatments!  

We split the girls into 2 groups- one group started with a pedicure foot soak, foot and leg scrub/massage and then went on to the nail station.

The other group started with facials. First, a tingly mint mud mask. The girls thought it was beyond hilarious looking at each other (and themselves!) with green faces!

Then they relaxed with some cucumber slices while soaking their feet and getting their own foot scrub and massage.

Using the scrubs on their hands, too!

Then we went back for a face "steaming" to remove the mask and a homemade grapefruit toner.

Gorgeous!

Even Daddy and Quinn got in on the spa action!

 And then we switched stations!

No pictures, please!

Birthday girl gets her facial.

And off to relax...

These girls have the spa relaxation thing down pat!

Then back to the table to remove the mask and "tone"...

...while our other girls gor their nails fancied up...

Continued in next post...

Sophia's 8th birthday Spa Party! Part 1

I've had a couple people ask me for details on the Spa party so rather than type a bunch of separate e-mails I thought I'd dust off the old, severely neglected blog and put the info here.

Most people know I love to plan parties and I get rather into the details, so this may get a little long- I'm going to split it up into 3 separate posts since there are a lot of photos.  This was such a fun party to plan and execute!  What girl - big or little- doesn't love to be pampered?

For the invitations, we used a template found on Martha Stewart for a sleep mask (if the link doesn't go directly to the spa mask, it's #4 of the 13 photos in the article).  We made ours from felt, scrap fuzzy fabric, and ribbons hot glued together - with a few dried lavender buds inside - and printed the invite on cardstock (FYI- the pink isn't on the actual invite, it's JUST blurring out our contact info, just in case!).

Party Favors:

Sophia saw some photos of spa treatments and noticed the women were all wearing robes so she asked if I could get all the girls matching pink robes to wear.  That was entirely out of the budget ;) so instead we made "Spa wraps"/pool cover-up dresses for each girl. Inexpensive towels, ruffle trim, elastic and velcro - much more budget-friendly!

It was a little interesting at times on my old sewing machine, and I won't allow any of my friends who are actually good seamstresses to look at them too closely, but in the end they turned out cute and served the purpose well.  Hopefully they'll also hold up long enough that the girls can use them as pool covers, too! The rest of the party favors included "spa shoes" (Dollar-tree flip flops covered with the scraps from the wraps), a spa headband ($-tree) and a Piggy Paints pedicure set (stocking stuffers I got super cheap on holiday clearance a few months back) in a pink plastic bucket.

Decorations:

I mostly used decorations from Sophia's bedroom and items saved from previous parties (it works well for me that she always wants pink in her party themes!).  Large plastic tablecloths cut lengthwise were the streamers on the light fixture.  The "S-P-A" letters are from my (unfinished) name letter project for Sophia's wall.  Her name happens to have all the right letters so I grabbed them!

Pink tulle tied onto inexpensive white washcloths to keep with the "spa" theme.

Even Gracie got into the spa mood!

Food:

We kept the snacks light and simple - pink strawberry lemonade along with-

Pink popcorn! 
(click link for recipe)

 "Spa slipper" nutter butter cookies

 Tea sandwiches - PB&J and cucumber with cream cheese

 Rainbow fruit salad skewers.

The party!

As soon as the girls arrived we started the afternoon with a snack and a little discussion about "spa etiquette".  It was pretty funny to watch them transform from running around and (literally) jumping off the furniture into "ladies" ready for an afternoon of spa pampering.

After snack, we headed to the dining room to change into our spa wear and prepare for pampering.

 The girls each got to make their own custom-scented sugar scrub for our "spa staff" to use during their foot soak/massage.

Then the girls split into 2 groups and started making their way through the spa stations.

Continued in next post (lots of photos!).

First words and WALKING!

~sniff~.  My baby boy is officially a toddler now.  He's been stringing a 1-2 steps together a week or so now but on Monday, June 4 Quinn took his first "real" purposeful steps and by Friday he was pretty much all walking and no crawling.  He is a boy on the GO!  I'm thankful he waited as long as he did - with the way he was pulling up and motoring at 9-10 mos I was sure he'd be running before a year!  So glad we got an extra 2.5 months of "babyness" before the big day.

He also said his first word on June 12.  Not "mama" or "dada" or even the ubiquitous"NO"! 

Here's a little video link from June 13

The Norders go to Disney!

We found out in late February that Mike was going to be attending a work-related conference on Disney World property in mid-April and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to make a family vacation out of it!  We decided to keep it a secret from the kids until the night before we left.  While it was a HUGE challenge to implement, it made it so much fun!The kids knew we were going to do something as a family that weekend but were guessing things like hiking, going out for ice cream, etc.  It was fun nnouncing it to them at dinner Friday night.  I had consulted with their teachers about make-up work for school and they suggested having the kids keep journals so I made up special Disney World Journals for both of them and after dinner told them, "I told your teachers about our fun family weekend and they thought it sounded like a lot of fun!  In fact, they want you both to keep a journal and write all about it!"  This was, of course, met with whines and grumpy faces, and even after presenting Journals with Mickey Mouse on the cover they still weren't catching on.  It took us telling them READ THE COVER a few times before aleb finally asked if we were going to Disney World.  And even then they both were really confused since we rarely take big trips.  It wasn't until we fully explained getting up at 5:30, getting on a plane, flying across the country, and being gone for a week that they finally got it.  Then they were too excited to fall asleep!

We arrived in Orlando mid-day Saturday and decided to keep it low-key.  Our conference ticket package included a visit to "Disney Quest", which is just a big fancy arcade in downtown Disney, so we had dinner and headed there to check it out.  This is the only pic I got all day!