Pandamonium

After Caitlyn's baptism, we had a party for friends and family who came to town to celebrate Caitlyn's 8th birthday. It was pandamonium...and a little pandemonium as well!

Caitlyn's favorite animal are pandas so Auntie Marian planned a party around that theme. Everything was black and white and lime green. There was a panda pinata (which was enormous, by the way).

There were panda prizes and panda party favors. Pandas on the cupcakes and panda presents...well, you get the idea.

Caitlyn was so excited. The party turned out pretty good despite the pandemonium aspect of it. We started late because the decorations were not done. The wind was blowing and popping many of the balloons...those that didn't fly off. It took us a while to get the party going after that as the kids were already engaged in playing with each other. The gigantic pinata was kind of hard for the kids to destroy as they are more of a cardboard box nowadays than an actual paper mache pinata. After all the younger kids had their turn, we finally had one of the teenage cousins put an end to the panda's misery and to let out all the candy and toys for the younger kids.

We didn't get to half the games I think. My elderly father had to retreat to the shelter of my sister's car at some point because of the misery of being in the constant wind. And so by the time we got to the shave ice, more than half the guests had to leave and the kids ended up just playing with half of the shave ice like snowballs.

It was quite an exhausting day. For Emily's party, we had quite a bit of leftover food which we then ate for dinner and so I tried not to go too crazy this time with making too much food. This time, we actually ended up not having enough food! Most of everyone that came was able to eat all they wanted but we had a few late-comers that ended up with very little if any at all. I had over 10 pounds of shredded beef for drip beef sandwiches, over 10 pounds of grapes, 3 heads of cabbage for ramen salad and a big stack of hot dogs for the kids...along with water, juice boxes and chips. I thought that there would be enough, but apparently, I was wrong. It is so hard to plan for feeding so many people. On the bright side, we didn't have to bring any food home except for some cupcakes. For Emily's party, we had over half a Costco sheet cake left and no one really wanted to eat it. Costco cakes used to be pretty good, but they taste a lot like grocery store cakes now and we are too spoiled with homemade cakes to want to eat it. I sucked it up and made my own cupcakes this year and we didn't have any problems polishing off what was left this time!

We had a little thank you gift for Auntie Marian (for without her help, there would not be these big crazy parties).

Caitlyn made her a black, white and green friendship bracelet as a thank you. She had a lot of trouble with it as she wanted to make a new design for her, but after having to take apart the bracelet several times because of mistakes, one of the strings snapped off halfway through and she had to start over, but as time was short, I just had her make one of her more basic designs.

When almost everyone was gone and we finally finished cleaning up and loading up our cars, we finally retreated back to the house to open presents.

Happy Birthday Caitlyn! We hope you had a good day. We are so very proud of your decision to become baptized. Thank you to all our friends and family that was able to come out to support us and share in this day with us and a special thanks to Auntie Marian for all her hard work, crazy ideas and generosity.