Party animals

As mentioned earlier, Mabes has decided she loves kittens. You might call it a bit of an obsession. She decided she wanted a cat party, and immediately started planning. Awesome, less work for me. I wanted to make a pinata again, but that kind of took a lot of time. Plus, they recently chopped down a bunch of our trees, so we had nowhere to hang it--it was a convenient excuse.
I decided to do cat ears and collars in addition to Mabes' well-planned games. The kids colored shrinky dinks with their names on them, we baked them, then put them on their beaded collars. Dave was surprised how long the beading took them--I've worked with several of these kids in our preschool co-op, so I was banking on it taking them a while to do that while I made lunch!
When they finished, they played games. At Mabes' request, Dave made a "pin the tail on the cat" game, but took it a step farther and had it be "pin everything on the cat." And then instead of Duck Duck Goose, they played Cat Cat Mouse. And Cat Cat Bird. Mabes was disappointed that we didn't have time for Dog Dog Cat. (Creativity was limited.)

Picasso's cat

I used Sarah's recipe to make strawberry cupcakes with strawberry icing. It uses real strawberries in both the cupcakes and icing, so it's practically health food! And I had made the candy cats (boo, the whiskers were messy, but I stopped caring after the first one) in advance, so the cupcakes were super easy to throw together the day-of.
It was a fun, easy party and I had a lot of fun planning it with Mabes. Of course, despite games and activities, the kids enjoyed running around playing cats the most. Mabes has decided she wants to be a cat for Halloween--with the ears and collar, I think her costume is pretty much done. I just can't let her change her mind.

I think she enjoyed her ice cream.