Grace's artist birthday party

Today was Grace's 7th birthday party and we decided to go with an artist theme, since she's been an artist since she first wrote on herself with a sharpie as a toddler.  She's been drawing on herself and other inappropriate things ever since, so we encouraged drawing and painting on paper only, and she's turned into quite an artist!

The party didn't start out quite how I planned it on Friday when I was getting ready.  I was going to make a cake that looked like this:

I was going to cut a 9x13 cake into this shape, I had all the colors of frosting ready and a pretzel stick to make the paintbrush, and then this happened:

It broke into chunks coming out of the pan.  I was devastated.  I was already stressed out because my health has been bad, the house wasn't clean, I had tons of unfinished homework since I've decided to go back to school, decorating and cookie baking still needed to be done, so I did what any normal woman would do.  I cried.  Then I went to Walmart, and found this.

It's not an artist's palette, but it's got an art theme, and that's good enough.  A seven year old isn't going to know the difference, or even care.  It's cake with frosting, that's all that matters to them.  *whew*  Then we got to work on decorating in rainbow colors, because artists use every color of the rainbow.  Ben and Ember helped blow up balloons and Ben says we have somewhere close to 50, he kept counting and re-counting them but the balloons wouldn't hold still.

The room looks very festive.  Today's activities included painting palette shaped sugar cookies and decorating them with M&M's and pretzel sticks to look like paint and a brush, playing "Draw Something" with the girls (if you don't have this app on your phone, please get it and play with me, my username is Jillx3), painting white fold up accordion fans that I found on a wedding party favors website, opening presents, eating cake and ice cream and pizza, and generally having a blast.  Grace doesn't even know how difficult putting this party together was for me, but Ember does.  She kept hugging me and told me that everything I did, messed up or not, was perfect because it came from me.  Then she helped me decorate and solve every problem that came my way.  Ember was my hero yesterday.

palette sugar cookies

 painting accordion fans

 balloon fun!

 Kids version of "Draw Something"

 Opening presents!

 Mom & Dad got Gracie her first easel, with the accessories kit.  

Our house really will be wallpapered now 

with Grace's masterpieces!

So happy birthday to my sweet little baby girl who isn't a baby anymore!  She's a 7 year old, going into 2nd grade, taking piano and ballet lessons, awesome reader, talented artist, creative, helpful, beautiful, amazing daughter that I get to call mine for eternity!  Love you Grace-face!

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