The Jones Journal: Happy Fifth Birthday Erin!!

Wow - five years!!! I can't believe how the time has flown by -- and yes, I know its a complete cliche -- but all cliches are based in truth - isn't that what makes it a cliche? Our girls are growing up SO fast!! This year, I don't know what came over me -- I'll admit it. I have a problem. I was channeling my inner Martha - or maybe I was just totally overwhelmed with all the other things that I have going on right now and decided to procrastinate by throwing myself completely into party planning. For whatever reason, I really got into Erin's party. Our newly remodeled and reopened downtown Franklin Theatre was playing the Disney movie "Tangled" today -- its based on the Rapunzel story if somehow you missed that. We took that as our party inspiration and ran with out -- We invited the little girls from her class this year to come to the movie and then walk over to the house for pizza and cake afterwards.

I found a woman on Etsy who made these adorable movie tickets for me -- you pay one (low) fee and she sends you an image so you can print as many as you like! We sent each girl two tickets along with the invitation -- and she also made the invitation for me --

Well, then I went completely off the deep end. I looked around on the internet and found some other moms' ideas for Tangled parties -- some I copied and others I made up as I went. One of my own ideas was to make these flags -- the flags are an important symbol in the movie and I knew I could make them easily - I bought wooden dowels and little tops at the craft store and spray painted them gold. Then I made the flags out of purple and yellow cardstock. The idea was that I would give each child a flag to carry on the way from the movie to our house, but the skies were looking ominous so we ended up driving.

Erin wanted to have the party on the porch, so I made a banner based on the flags in the movie and we hung paper lanters (also important in the movie). You can see it is dark in this picture because I didn't finish setting up until late last night!

For goodie bags, I used paper popcorn holders (to carry over the movie theme). We filled them with stickers, coloring sheets, etc.

found a template on the Disney website to make these blowers that are supposed to look like Pascal - a chameleon friend of Rapunzels -- they didn't turn out exactly like the picture - but the girls thought they were cute.

Erin and I made these cookies for the goodie bags -- they are supposed to look like the purple flag with yellow sun emblem - they sort of turned out like that, right?

Mary Clare wrote this on our walkway last night for Erin.

Here is Erin posing in her costume this morning -- see her wig? And the looooong hair? Mary Clare and I looped lots and lots of yarn along our picket fence last night to look like a long braid. It turned out cute!

Here she is with her umbrella walking to the movie theatre!

The girls all had fun - we got everyone popcorn and drinks. The movie theatre is gorgeous and we are so lucky to have such a great place near our house!

Erin was so excited -- when the movie began all the girls were singing along and laughing.

Back at the house we had pizza and cake. Erin picked out "sparkler" candles, but when the time came to light them, she got a little nervous.