It's Great to be Eight

This is the first ever friend invited birthday party we have hosted.

 With a suggestion from me, Merilee chose a pajama party. It was so fun!  The girls all wore pajamas and we continued with that theme.  We played pin the slippers on the girl that I made to look like Merilee.

 We invited 13 girls from church and 11 of them came.  I planned to have 10 girls total since only a couple of them had RSVPd.  So it also took much longer than I thought to get through the games, activities, food, and presents.

 After the game we decorated pillow cases with iron-on shapes.  We had a butterfly, flower, high heel shoe, star, and heart.  I ran out of pillow cases so Merilee, Cara, and one other girl had to use a pillowcase we already had.  It was chaos!!

 Merilee chose to have white cupcakes with chocolate frosting.  I counted out 6 candles and thought that was enough.  I pull them out and Justin says, "where's the rest of the candles?" and I say they are all there.  Then it dawned on me that she was 8 not 6....duh!!  I was actually still getting over my cold which I guess killed more brain cells than I thought;)  Well, I only had six so she blew out the six and then we lit two again and she blew those out.  It was so crazy, no one cared.  We also served grapes, orange and apple slices, and mini quiche.  Kind of like breakfast/tea party type food.  And we had hot cocoa to drink. 

Here are all the girls.  Merilee was really sweet and if her friend had a younger or older sister, she wanted to invite them too so they wouldn't feel left out.  I had to put my foot down for the sisters that were younger than 3 and older than 11.  We have Heidi and Maya, Millie, Madison, Emma and Natalie, Laynie and Nora, Emmi, Makayla and Aubrey, and Merilee and Cara.