I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for ...

Another year, another little girlie birthday party. This time the birthday girl selected ice cream as the theme. So I started my search for ideas. Once again, Pinterest and BirthdayPartyIdeas.com came to my rescue. I found some ideas I adored, but didn't have the time or mental capacity to fulfill (like a cardboard ice cream truck or an ice cream parlor booth complete with striped awning.) We moved up the party to squeeze it in between a holiday and my going out of town. So I scaled back my grand plans to accommodate our schedule.

I definitely wanted to create invitations with a seven scoop ice cream cone representing the birthday girl's age. We decided to hold it after school, but finish before dinner. As soon as we delivered the invitations, the school notified us of a field trip that would return after regular dismissal time. So we kept the date, but pushed the time back and added pizza to the party plans.

I found a couple of fun garland ideas and ended up making this one using real cones, yarn balls, and pom poms for cherries.

I forgot to take a photo of the front door decor. I bought an accordion folded paper ball, cut it in half, and used it as the ice cream scoop on top of a cardboard triangle for a cone. Here is a cropped picture of one we hung in the house.

Practically every children's birthday party I've ever thrown included a variation of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." This time was no exception. We made a poster titled, "Plop the Cherry on Top." You know the routine.

Another game we played, was a balancing relay. We bought two brightly colored polka-dotted balls at Walmart and made "cones" out of poster board.

Our last game was not your typical party game, but I liked it because it was different. We divided the kids into two teams, gave each a squeeze bottle of frosting and the same number of  ice cream cones and told them to see who could build the tallest ice cream cone castle the fastest.

There were a bunch of creative cakes related to ice cream, but I really wanted to make the cake resemble the invitations. So we used several colors of frosting to make cupcakes look like ice cream scoops. I really liked the finished product, but I liked the ease it came together even better.

We pulled out the parfait glasses and let the guests make their own ice cream sundae with choice of syrups and toppings.

For a favor bag, I used my old standby of brown paper lunch bags, glued on a scrapbook paper cone and scoops and hand wrote with Sharpie, "Thank you for being so sweet!" We included some marshmallows we found at Walmart shaped liked mini ice cream cones. We also filled sugar cones with Skittles, then topped them with a ball of cotton candy and tied them up in cellophane bags.

Nothing over the top, but the girlies had fun. Whew!