A Very, Merry Unbirthday to...Alyssa

I hadn't seen "Alice in Wonderland" since I was a kid and about a month ago, Alyssa saw a little bit of it at her cousin, Robbie's, house. We checked it out from the library shortly after getting back home. She watched it three or four times that week and it gave me an idea. Most people who know Alyssa, know that she was born on Christmas. We wanted to have a birthday party for her for her 4th birthday and ended up not doing it because most of her friends were out of town. Knowing that we would probably want to do it again for her 5th birthday and not wanting to run the risk of not having friends in town, we decided that we would throw her an Unbirthday Party instead. Here is the invitation.

I had to do a bit of research to remember some of the different things from Alice in Wonderland that we could use. I also got some help from fellow bloggers(who I don't know) who had also thrown unbirthday parties for their kids. I mixed everything together and this is what we ended up with. After coming into the house in their dress ups, the kids took a trip down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Wonderland was our living room decorated with lots of balloons and streamers with a few things from the movie - The Chestire Cat, which was used for "Pin the Smile on the Cat," Face cards taped to the wall, googly-eyed flowers, etc.

Here are Alyssa and Ashley with the first guest to arrive - Emily.

Once most of the guests had arrived, we played a couple of games of Musical Chairs. There were only 3 or 4 of the girls that could finish the game without getting distracted.

I had planned on having different hats for the girls to put on for the tea party, but decided to let them decorate some foam visors with stickers instead (our hat collection doesn't stay very big due to the girls standing on the hats and breaking them shortly after they get put into our dress-up box). After hat decorating we started the tea party. We served cupcakes and cookies.

By the way, these were the best cupcakes that I have EVER made. I have to include that because I was so proud of myself. We also served them juice and colored water to drink.

Here are the girls enjoying the tea party.

After the tea party, we watched Alyssa open her presents. Here is the group of girls just before starting.

Alyssa loved all of her gifts and has been quite busy the past couple of days moving from one toy to the next. Here are the girls after the presents were all opened.

At this point, we played "Pin the Smile on the Chestire Cat" and handed them each a candy prize after the game was over. Then they played "Ring Around the Rosies" and "London Bridge is Falling Down." We handed them goodie bags as parents began to arrive to pick them up.

In my opinion the party was a success. Alyssa asked to have another one for her birthday in December. The girls all seemed to have a lot of fun and I had a lot of fun planning it and buying all of the supplies. My only regrets were that none of the boys we invited came (we purposely went with a theme that was for boys and girls) and that it was such a pain to find somewhere that sold latex helium balloons. When we did find a place it was much more expensive then we expected. You can imagine how mad we were when two of them popped within 5 minutes of getting home. We had to quickly cut all of the strings short enough to be out of reach of the kids. On the other hand, the ones that didn't pop and haven't been used to give us Chimpmunk voices for the girls are still afloat in our living room so they have, at least, lasted awhile.