Celebrating Hello Kitty Style

Well, Princess Thundercloud starts planning her next birthday party about ten minutes after the current one ends.  We’ve gone through approximately 532 themes this year, but the colors are always the same…pink and purple. She’s such a conformist.

I didn’t even get to make cupcakes for her preschool…she insisted on taking Strawberry Cream Oreos instead of something mom-made.  Can you believe it?

Here’s some ideas from the party we had over the weekend for her.  It was small…only six kids, counting our three, but it was perfect for a 4th birthday!




The centerpiece was pink and white wafer cookies. sugar-dipped marshmallows, pixie sticks, pink and purple M&Ms, and Malted milk eggs.  Thank goodness for Easter clearances!


To make the marshmallows, we used 6” bamboo skewers (the point is down), dipped the end of the marshmallows in melted white chocolate, then pink and white hearts and pink decorating sugar. Super easy and cute, but for some reason, my camera would not focus on them…maybe they were too glittery?


Scrapbooking paper was on sale 7/$1 at Michaels, so we punched out Hello Kitty faces for straw decorations and to make picks for the cupcakes.


I cut out cupcake wrappers from some other scrapbooking paper.  The cupcakes were cherry cake with cherry buttercream, then we rolled the edges in the pink sugar and sprinkled on decoration.  When I say we, I mean it.  Thundercloud and her brothers all helped with making the cupcakes and the decorations. Without fighting. It was amazing.


We blew up balloons to make flowers and rows along the tops of the doorways, and my GI Joe bought pink heart and purple star Mylar balloons at the dollar tree. We think their balloons are the best…last year in Washington we used the same balloons for everyone’s birthday, starting in September and lasting until June.  They were a little deflated by my birthday in June, but we were moving to Wisconsin that month, so didn’t invest in more!


While the guests were arriving, we put on a Hello Kitty DVD and had HK coloring pages on the coffee table, which I covered with more of the scrapbooking paper, in case of over-scribbling.

After everyone had arrived and settled down a bit, they each made their own pizza. Thundercloud says she wants to be a pizza chef when she grows up, so she insisted on the menu.

We also had veggies and dip and a rainbow fruit platter with yogurt for dipping. I think the adults enjoyed those more than the kids, but that’s fine!  The kids drank Izze sodas, which they always think they want but end up not drinking. I think they don’t like the fizz, since they normally don’t drink soda.  Izze is just fruit juice and carbonated water, so I don’t feel horrible about them having it occasionally.


While the pizza baked and then cooled a bit, we played some games.  Here’s a friend playing “Pin the Bow on Hello Kitty,”  I bought a poster at Michaels then printed a bunch of bows using Photoshop.  I downloaded an entire kit of Hello Kitty party printables from Shery K Designs via Tip Junkie. The bow was on one of the designs, so it took no time to print and cut out. We just wrote each kid’s name on theirs and put a little double-stick tape on the back of each.  After the party, I peeled them off (carefully) and put the poster in Thundercloud’s bedroom.

We also played “Hello Kitty Says” like Simon Says and Hot Potato using a HK doll. We had another game but forgot to do it…we blew up a bunch of white and yellow balloons and tied them up in a big sheet. The plan was for the kids to grab hold of the edges and “pop corn.”  Balloon are always entertaining. Oh, well, there’s always next time!


After lunch she opened her presents.  What a difference from the chaos that always ensues when the boys are opening.  She and her friends opened each gift, looked at them, talked about them, then moved on to the next. She got this really cute cupcake memory game…we’ve all played it about 987 times already.

Ready for the cupcakes!

Fortunately, 4 candles would fit on one cupcake, so only she only blew spit on her own!


The last, and most anticipated event, was the pinata. This is one that you take turns pulling a string until it opens, the first time we’d tried this kind.  I probably should have mentioned that when I told the hubs I thought he could just hold the pinata this time.  He looked a little concerned. And unwilling.  The strings worked great, though.  Everyone took a turn, then since it still wasn’t open, they all pulled at once, which opened it right up.

My oldest even gave all his loot to the littlest girl there, since she didn’t get the concept of every man for him/her self!  I rewarded him with a chocolate covered Peep for his chivalry.


In addition to their pinata loot and game prizes (bracelet, necklaces, and erasers), each guest got one of these little cookie cups and one of the mylar balloons.

It was a fun, although much more relaxed than the boys’, party.  I think Princess Thundercloud felt like such a big girl, planning and helping prepare for it, and she was so excited to be the hostess.

Oh, and just an explanation of the great detail in this post. Every time I went to a party as a kid, as soon as I got I the car, my mom would ask what we played and what we ate.  And if we said, “Thanks for inviting me. I had a very nice time.”  I’m sure that never sounded rehearsed at all.

My kid party duties are over for a few months now…not until the end of September…but I feel the need for a S’More-gasbord and Beer Campfire coming on as soon as the weather is a bit warmer!