The Girl on Fire

We haven't done a very good job this year of having birthday parties anywhere close to actual birthdays.  Our family scheduling seems to be getting trickier.  Fortunately, we have some patient children.  Unfortunately, S is not one of them.

But she survived the wait, even if it was rather unwillingly.

She had a tough time coming up with a theme for her birthday this year.  I had a couple great ideas (or so I thought) which she vetoed.  Her birthday was looming ever closer and she still couldn't settle on anything.  Finally, I had to explain to her that if she didn't choose something RIGHT NOW, there would be no party at all.  These things require some planning time after all.

So she chose the hunger games.  Shaggy and I read the books to S & K at the beginning of last year and all the hype surrounding the impending movie had S intrigued.  I took some convincing since just going to a movie and coming home for cake seemed like sort of a cop out.  But her procrastination made it's simplicity very appealing. 

I loosely copied a design idea I saw somewhere online and printed the invitations front and back, like a real ticket.  Then we sent them out and realized a day or so later that the day wouldn't work so we had to reschedule it all.

Which was totally ok with me since I had absolutely no idea how I was going to make a hunger games cake.  When my online searches came up with nothing that I  a) liked or  b) would be able to come remotely close to copying, I had to resort to skimming the book for inspiration.  It turns out that the book had a scene that lended itself perfectly to cake decorating.  "Frosting. The final defense of the dying."  Peeta totally lost his head over this, but we were able to re-attach it without incident.

If you haven't read the books and you don't know what I'm talking about, I only have one thing to say to you.  Read the books.  Don't go see the movie.  Read the books.  And then you can think about seeing the movie.

Like these brave tributes did.  And one girl from the capitol.  Who thought her friends were going to dress like they were from the capitol, too.  But their outfits lacked that certain capitol flair and looked rather ordinary, after all.

And no, I did not buy a t-shirt just for this party.  K bought that herself.  She has more spending money that I do, that's for sure.  She even almost bought a Kindle Fire a few weeks ago.  But the jury went back to deliberate a little more on that decision.

Favors were extra simple since we paid for all the movie tickets.  Dollar store boxes with some Etsy buttons and a circle printout which contained a mix of cherry jelly beans and red hots.  Sweet or fire, take your pick.

This girl was not so gung-ho on the whole fun picture thing, but she indulged her crazy mom just a little anyway.  Here she is ready to sleep tied to a tree branch with her bow at the ready.  Sometimes it's kind of nice that our backyard has such an odd assortment of leftover tree trimmings.  It makes these crazy pictures possible.

She's officially a pre-teen now, which is hard to believe since I was just watching some old home videos of her has a bald, but grinning little peanut.  She's so much bigger now and every bit as impatient.  I can't wait to meet the girl that she's becoming.  Happy birthday, baby girl!