Friday, March 20, 2009

Chocolate and Vanilla

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This weekend is my oldest's birthday party. She turns 11 on Monday, but weekdays are bad times for parties especially when it's spring break in Oregon. Of course, she's still performing for St. Patrick's celebrations, dancing in Tacoma today and again tomorrow in Portland. That left us Sunday for the party. A good thing since I'll need tomorrow to clean!

She wanted to have a French Poodle theme. The colors would be pink, black and white. I already had a craft and an activity I'd bought a couple of years ago as well as invitations I could print on so was pretty much set. Easy peasy, I thought. Until she tossed something unexpected into theme "Afternoon in Paris" theme...she wanted to have pasta for lunch.

This might not have been a problem for any other mom, but I'm all into the theme. I'll be honest, I'm completely insane over themes. No way was pasta going to work with Paris, but since that's her favorite food I knew we had to have that for the lunch portion. So I put on my thinking cap and came up with a new theme. Well, actually a double theme. She gets her afternoon in Paris with French Poodles, a fashion-jewelry type craft and decorating pastries, but first she and her guests will get a taste of Tuscany with a pasta bar and Italian sodas.

Not willing to stop there, I decided to go full bore with the travel idea. I made passports for each of the ten girls who'll be attending. I found a rail map from Rome to Paris on the Internet, too. I also made stickers of all the things we'd be doing, French and Italian flags/landmarks, passport stamps, a Eurail ticket and anything else I thought they might want to put in their passports. I also have space for autographs.

And in case you're wondering what the LOLcat picture above has to do with the post, remember the part about pastry decorating. Well, my daughter wants to have both chocolate and vanilla (okay, yellow) so the girls can choose what kind of cake they want. I'm borrowing a baking dish from a friend that makes a little larger than cupcake size round cake layers. But instead of just making 10 cakes, I'll need to make 20 so each has a choice. Oh, well, baking cakes is easy and cheap so I shouldn't complain. I think I'll bake them the night before. I'll have too much else going on with the pasta lunch to worry about cakes.

Now to pull it all together! That's what I'll be doing the next couple of days. How about you?