Clara's 7th Birthday Party

Clara Grace wanted a Tangled theme for her birthday this year. While searching for invitations I came across a lady online that will personalize invitations and a little over 24 hours after placing the order, I had a finalized proof. I think these turned out really cute. I printed them on photo paper to give a really nice crisp finish. After handing them out we received lots of positive comments on how well they turned out. It was also nice to be able to print off as many as I needed and not worry that I would run out. Since there were two invitations per image, I was able to print off a total of four invitations per page.
Being the smart marketing lady that she is, she also replied with the final proof that she could easily provide a thank you graphic. I'm a sucker, so went for it. I'll have Clara write a personal message on the back, but I thought they were really cute.
We chose to have the party in the community room of an apartment building here on base. Clara Grace is now too old to use the room we used last year. Our community room is booked for the entire year and after we were lucky to land this one. I did some online searching for ideas and it turned out rather well I think. The table below had Tangled coloring sheets and puzzles for the kids to work on upon arriving (or throughout the party as it turned out).

Here are the party favor boxes. I opted to get a more masculine one for the boys. This is also where the gifts were placed.
The braid was inspired by this blog and the "Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Rider" game from this blog. Charlie and Clara helped me make the braid. I used five packages of yarn. Our backs were rather sore by the time it was over. We measured it after completing the braid and discovered it was 11 feet long. This inspired me to make a game of it. After greeting the guests upon arrival I pointed them over here to guess how long Rapunzel's braid was. There were little slips of paper to make the guess on and then they put their guess in the little bowl. The winner was Haley, with an estimate of 3 feet. Clara Grace came in second with a guess of 20 feet. From there, the estimates were waaaaay off, all the way up to 100 feet.
This is the poster I made for the Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Rider game. Clara Grace thinks I am wonderful after watching me make this. One day she will discover it only took a lot of determination to complete the thing and very little talent. I found a poster online that someone else had made, printed it off on a transparency and off to school I went to use my overhead projector. Clara Grace had never seen one in use and was quite amazed. I had to explain this was old school technology and how it works. Anyway, I spent a lot of time bent over coloring in all the black once I had it traced. I was quite pleased with how it looked and must admit that I am attached to it. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but I repeatedly had to tell one little girl that kept asking for it that I wasn't ready to let it go.
We did several other games. This is a picture of a couple of girls trying to pop a balloon by squeezing it between their backs. None of the pairs were successful so I eventually ended the competition by giving the youngest little guy a little assistant.
Here we did the pull string pinata. It was quite humorous as there were only three strings left when the candy began to fall. I had to give the pinata a few taps to get a good flow though and the candy was just raining down on their little heads as they scrambled to fill their bags.


I was really pleased with how the cake turned out. A friend of mine made it. She was worried it wasn't going to look good, but all her cakes turn out great so I had no concerns. Otherwise I was going to have to give it a try and that would have been...sad. The commissary has very limited birthday cake options.

Zach had a blast and was cute when the kids played freeze dance to the Tangled soundtrack. For the most part he just ran around and did his own thing.
The kids were so cute watching Clara Grace open gifts. I was amazed that there were no duplicates and the gifts were all really nice and thoughtful.
The time flew and the kids all seemed to have a lot of fun. Clara Grace loved it and was very pleased. She had ten friends show up plus adults. Charlie and I stayed rather busy between leading games, making sure Zach was doing ok. Charlie also had to go pick up the pizza since the scheduled delivery never happened. The result is that we didn't get a ton of pictures of the action. After the party several people stayed and helped us clean up. They had us loaded up and ready to leave in very little time.