A Sweet 16 Birthday Party Celebration

If you’ve ever felt bad for not having your act together, maybe this will make you feel better.

I just had a belated {cough, cough}, make that a very belated birthday party for Serenity who turned 16 in….

     November

Yes, it was late and the party was on my own birthday but that was okay with me and she still had a great time.

It was supposed to be a surprise…but she found out several weeks ago, which I did not know until recently. But I still tried to bluff my way through in the hopes that some part of it would be a surprise. But it wasn’t.

So the lesson I learned from this was: be super careful with emails and with texts.

Serenity turned 16 in November and a friend of hers turned 16 in December. So, we had a joint party which was very fun actually. (yes me and the other mom were kind of both a little belated with this sweet 16 party business. Ha!)

We had rain all day – the first rain in months but no one let that hinder them.  They all brought their vehicles up our 2 mile muddy and slick road.

Surprise!

The decorations.

The food.

I used this recipe to make the Marinated Ham & Swiss Sandwiches but made the following changes – I used 1T onion powder instead of fresh onion, did not use Horseradish mayonnaise although it sounds wonderful, used sesame seeds instead of parsley as well as wheat dinner rolls from SAM’s. I doubled the sauce because it did not look like enough at all, made them the night before and they turned out great!

In the chafing stand, I had 2 different kinds of fondue for dipping the vegetables.  The Cheesy Garlic Fondue we had for our Valentine’s Dinner and I also made a Spinach Fondue that was really tasty.

And rounded out the menu with:

Kettle Cooked Potato Chips

Sweet Kale salad mix from Costco (totally cheated & bought the ready-made salad)

Water, Fresh Squeezed Lemonade & Iced Tea

The dessert table.

The other birthday girl’s brother made them both chocolate covered strawberries.

The Games

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of the set-up for this game but I knew from our Castle Keeper club the girls’ favorite candies. I bought Jolly Ranchers and chocolate Crunch candy bars and everyone wrote down whose favorite they thought it was and how many was in the jar. The person who had the right person with their favorite candy and had the closest guess as to how many were in the jar won the candy.

The winners with the birthday girls.

I made up a little trivia game about both of the girls. Everyone had to answer each question with one of the girl’s names, or Neither or Both.

One of the relays was a puzzle game.  They had to run down, place a piece of the puzzle together and run back. I stopped the game at 10 minutes. I had purchased some 24 piece puzzle but somehow the bag didn’t come home with me. 🙁 100 piece puzzles are just too big so definitely go with the 24 piece.

We taped everyone’s thumbs down and they had to try and tie a tennis shoe with no thumbs. We had a table set up for team with 3 tennis shoes on it. Three people from one team would work on their shoe and when they finished they ran down to tag the next person.

Then it was boys against girls in Food Presentation. They each had 4 colors of playdough and had to make a plate of food. (plate was provided)

We had some real artistic presentations!

For prizes I placed them all in this basket and let them choose what they wanted. And guess what? There wasn’t any candy in there! {giving myself a pat on the back} Candy is so much easier!

The final game was the wheelbarrow race relay.

We finally got to do this one when there was a short break in the steady downpour. 🙂

The guy was blindfolded and the girl had to give him verbal directions to direct him through the obstacle course.

Sometimes they forgot that the driver couldn’t see them and used their hands for directions.

And then there were a few tight squeezes as they met each other coming and going.

But it made for a good spectator sport.

And finally, the girls got to blow out their candles and have a slice of their very favorite cake.

Happy Sweet 16, Serenity! You are a true jewel. I’m blessed to be your mother.

xoxo