Happy Birthday, Emily!

Can you believe it? Emily is 6!  She is growing up so fast.  

Emily loves being six and she loves being in kindergarten.  She has made so many new friends and looks forward to going to school everyday.  She is doing so well in school too.  Her teacher is really impressed with how well she can read and says she is a very good student and always follows the rules and is nice to the other kids.  I am glad she is doing well and liking school so much.

Emily's birthday was on Sunday this year just like the year she was born.  Before church we let Emily open one present.

It was exactly what she wanted... Elsa and Anna Barbie dolls!  Emily loves the movie Frozen, just like every girl her age.  Because she loves it so much, she wanted to have a Frozen themed birthday party with all of her friends.

Because her birthday was on Sunday, we had her birthday party on Monday.  She invited all of the neighborhood kids her age as well as some new friends from school.  We had fun playing Frozen games.

We started the party by having the kids color Frozen coloring pages while they waited for the other kids to arrive.  The kids could also make paper snowflakes if they didn't want to color. We also had a frozen block of ice with little toys inside of it.  We gave the kids spoons and let them try and chip away at the ice block to try and get the toys out.  This was similar to the way Kristoff in the movie cut ice blocks for his ice business. 

When everyone had arrived, we opened presents.  Emily got a lot of fun new toys from her friends.  She especially loved the the microphone that played the "Let It Go." song from the movie.  She sang and performed the song for us over and over again. 

After the presents, we had our first game, Ice Block Races.  In this game, the kids had to pretend they were Kristoff and put their ice block on their sled and race to the other end of the yard.  This was a really fun game until two girls got ran over by the sleds.  They got their legs scraped pretty good and we felt so bad.  We decided it was time to move onto another game.

Next we played "Pin the Nose on Olaf."  This was a fun game and the kids had fun trying to find the right place for Olaf's nose.  I made this Olaf out of a cardboard box and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  I think I am going to use it for the Christmas party at Emily's school.  

Finally it was time for cake.  We all sang Happy Birthday to Emily and she blew out her candle.  Emily loved her cake and even helped me make it.

I just made a simply decorated cake this year but it still fit the theme.  Inside was the fun part though.  The inside of the cake was blue and white, the colors of Frozen. Ever since I made Russell's colorful birthday cake, Emily has wanted one too.  So here is her colorful cake.   I also made cupcakes to match.

The fun part of the party planning was making the gift bags for the guests.  I included four simple things that went along with the Frozen theme.  First I made white glittery play dough and called it "Snow Dough"  I gave each guest a baby food jar full of this dough.  Next I made simple fleece scarfs for each gift bag.  Then in a small Ziploc bag I put together large and small marshmallows, stick pretzels, and mini chocolate chips.  Attached to this bag was a tag that said, "Do you wanna build a snowman?"  And finally I included a small bag of Hershey's hugs with a tag of Olaf saying " I just want to give you lots of Hugs!"  These gift bags were really fun to make.  Along with the gift bags, I also made a few decorations.  I made paper figurines of Anna and Elsa as well as a pendant with pictures of the movie characters and a bunch of paper snowflakes.  Emily helped me with the snowflakes and made most of them.

After most of the guests had gone home, we had some more fun with the ice blocks:

Brinley, Emily and Brielle tried to see who could stand on the ice block the longest before their feet got too cold.  I think Brielle won because she was wearing shoes!  Logan also loved the ice blocks and was soaking wet from sitting on them all day.  Emily, Colby, and Brielle also had fun pulling each other on the sleds and racing with the ice blocks.  

I had also planned one more game that we didn't get to during the party but afterward, these three wanted to play it.  So we did. It was called building a snowman in St. George!  We wrapped Brielle, Emily and Colby up in toilet paper and then decorated them like snowmen.  They turned out so cool!  Their favorite part was pretending they were the Hulk and ripping out of the toilet paper after the picture.

Emily said she had a really fun birthday and loved having all of her friends around to play with.  

Happy Birthday, Emily.  We love you!