PART TWO: THE PLANNING
4: DECORATIONS
Having done your initial brainstorm, you’ll have come across some things that you’re definitely keen on implementing – food ideas, decorations, maybe activities too. Hold onto all this; we’ll go through it one thing at a time.
First up: decorations. Because I am prone to falling in love with far too many ideas, and the whole point of this process is to keep things fast and contained, I like to do a quick table sketch, because it immediately shows me that I’m trying to pack too much in – it won’t all fit on the table!! 😀 (And yes, make sure to allow plenty of room for food!) You can see my decoration sketch for the narwhal party here, and below is my sketch for the cow party. I didn’t do one for the Toy Story party because it was down at the local park – the only decorations I had were labels for the food/drinks. I also have one for the pirate treasure party, but I ended up raiding my sister’s props cupboard and found a whole bunch of things, so a lot of things changed from that initial plan (though the layout stayed basically the same).
Now, unless decorations are your FOCUS item (and honestly, even if they are), this is where things can spiral out of control and stress you out. The internet has SO many great ideas that look AMAZING – but let’s be honest: most of them look amazing because the person either paid a fortune for them, or spent years of their life on them. Having planned seven kids’ parties of my own now and been involved in a host of others, my rule of thumb is that magic number THREE, as in you only really need THREE key decorations to bring things together.
If decorations are your focus item, you might want to decorate the whole room, but for the rest of us, honestly? Just decorate the table. Make one corner of the room special, and you can pretty much ignore the rest, or just fill it with balloons and/or streamers in your theme colours. (Or, another handy idea for warm-weather parties, we set up a gazebo tent in the backyard – encourages food to be consumed outside, so less mess to worry about, and provides a contained boundary for decorations: the gazebo gets decorated and I’ll maybe stick something on the front door, and that’s it. Contained = keeping you alive.)
From my sketches, you can see my three key items:
- a backdrop on the wall behind the table,
- a decorative item on the table to give height and drama, and then
- small decorations across the front of the table.
Narwhal party: “snowflakes” as the backdrop, silver branches with sea stars on the right back of the table for height/drama/wow factor, and a couple of jellyfish across the front.
Cow party: tied-fabric-strip garland across the back as the backdrop, naked branches for height/drama, and a cow garland across the front of the table.
I made the cow garland the other night and it took a grand total of 30 mins while I was watching TV, and even then only because the cutting out was fiddly (I could have chosen an easier shape).
Pro tips here: see how the image I chose has a nice, thick, black border around it? That’s wriggle room for cutting so you don’t have to be so careful about cutting exactly right. Further pro tips? If you look closely at some of the cows, you’ll see how neatly I did NOT cut them out, but literally no one is going to notice this except you, because they’ll be focused on the food on the table. On the flip side, a lot more people will notice if you lose your chill 😉 🙂 😀
Treasure party: originally I was going with bubbles for the backdrop with the intent of reusing them for the future narwhal party (yes, I am campaigning hard :D); after raiding my sister’s props cupboard, this was changed to an actual printed-scene backdrop, and some paper circle-fan things in different blues (so bubble-ish). The height was going to be provided by a tree of stacked pineapples in the centre of the fruit salad, but my sister had blow-up palm trees that served the same function for zero cost, and while I was going to make portholes to string across the front of the tables, the fabric maps my sister had worked just as well for zero effort. Yay survival and not losing our chill, right? 🙂
And yes, this concept works for adult parties too. I didn’t really think about it consciously when I decorated for my sister’s baby shower, but the same principles were there:
Backdrop: tree branches and a literal ‘backdrop’ of vines and fairy lights on the table
Height: branches, the cake elevated on top of the fish tank (!), chopping boards on inverted bowls etc, and bunches of flowers to give varied height across the tables
Front element: further vines, branches and fairy lights across the front of the table on the floor.
Exactly the same principles, and yet it made the entire room feel utterly magical.
5: MENU
BEFORE you plan the menu, figure out 1) how many people you’re feeding, 2) how much time you have to cook, and 3) how many people you have to help you cook. The Toy Story party had a more extensive menu because my amazing mum volunteered (okay I begged and pleaded just a little) to make like 20 pizzas for it. The baby’s parties, in both 2017 and 2016? Soup. Soup and bread, because I am cooking and it’s mid-winter and even these ‘family-only’ parties are about 25 people and soup is QUICK and EASY, and easy to scale up.
Even the pizza for the Toy Story party was comparatively easy, because Mum could make them way ahead and freeze them. You do NOT want to be stuck doing major food prep on the day of the party, trust me on that one. That is almost a guaranteed way to lose your chill and end up dead. So I tend to opt for one main savoury dish that is quick, easy, can be prepped ahead and is easy to scale up – pizza, soup, etc. Figure you need one main dish like your pizza or soup, and maybe 2-3 accompaniments (though I’ll be honest, all I accompany soup with is a variety of breads – I guess 2-3 varieties still though, so similar concept?), and the same for dessert: if you’re serving cake, PLEASE serve it as your key dessert, because otherwise you WILL be left with acres and acres of cake that will see you through to the next family birthday! 😀 So, like savouries, figure cake + 2-3 accompaniments.
Which brings you to the only other food-related decision you have to make: to theme or not to theme! Because we’re all about maintaining our chill here, do what works for you. BUT, because we’re only decorating the table, and because why let something do one job when it could do two, I do tend to theme at least some of my food, because then it counts as extra decorations 😉 But you totally don’t have to, and you don’t have to theme all of it (see: soup, and also: chill).
For the Toy Story party (which, note, I have four accompaniments for each course because I had help with cooking!):
Main savoury: pizza, which becomes Pizza Planet pizza of course.
Accompaniments: “Camouflage salad” (just green-leaf salad with a variety of leaf colours, referring to the army men in the movie), “Slinky Dog pasta” (pasta salad with spiral pasta), “Sheriff badges” (cheesy puff pastry stars – referring to Woody), and “Mr Pricklepants pull-apart garlic bread” (get a loaf of bread, cut it into inch squares but not through the base, douse it in garlic butter, wrap in foil and bake).
Main dessert: Buzz Lightyear-inspired rocket cake
Accompaniments: “Cowgirl trail mix” (with lots of lollies and chocolate, of course, referring to Jessie), “Hamm’s Portraits” (pig-face-shaped meringues), “Green Aliens” (cups of green jelly with three meringue eyeballs on top for the Pizza Planet aliens), and “Potato-head Cupcakes” (DIY cupcake decoration – triple bonus: food, decoration AND an activity for the kids!).
Drinks: fruit tea (TEA-rex); water (rocket fuel); banana milkshake (moo juice).
For each of these I just had a little banner on a toothpick with a picture of the character and the name of the food, and voila! That was the decorations for the entire party.
For the narwhal party I wasn’t going to theme at all, because I was literally going to do just soup and cake (I did this in 2016 for her first birthday), but now it’s a cow party I am actually going to do a couple of themed desserts. The main dessert is cake, obviously, but I did circular chocolate brownies for ‘cow pats’ (totally gross but Mr 5 will LOVE it); and round sugar cookies with animal faces (the most time-consuming thing I’m doing, but if I play my organisation right the only things I’ll be doing in the two days up to the party will be these cookies and the cake).*
* Turns out piping faces with royal icing is a lot harder than it looks, so I downscaled: I made cowprint sugar cookies, covered with plain white royal icing and then with brown patches piped on out of dark chocolate.
For the pirate treasure party I kept things really simple, a) because of how much leftover food there was at the last summer kids’ party**, and b) because I was actually working through this process this time (from the worksheets! They do actually work!) which made it easier to keep it contained.
** Spoiler: there was still a lot of food left over. Like, 8 or 10 pizzas. I kid you not.
Main savoury: treasure map pizzas (took about 2-3 hours for two of us to make these the night before, but we also had literally twice as many pizzas as required, and it was FUN making them. Big deal: if it’s not fun, don’t spend so much time on it!)
Accompaniments: Crab croissants (which ended up just being croissants because I ran out of care-factor to make the eyes), seaweed dip with octopus, vegetable tree with crudités, and chips.
Main dessert: CAKE. Of course.
Accompaniments: fruit salad, sugar cookies (shaped as starfish and sand dollars***), and pirate gold (various gold-wrapped or yellow-coloured chocolates and lollies).
Drinks: iced water, tropical juice, and blue gatorade mixed with lemonade as ‘sea water’.
*** Another hot tip: DELEGATE, and get over it if it doesn’t look perfect. I got husband + a friend of his who was staying just before the party to supervise the kids making the sugar cookies (I’d made the dough two days earlier). They LOVED cutting out the cookies and making them (the kids, that is, HA), and were SUPER proud on the day that THEY had contributed 🙂
