Butterfly Birthday Party

My daughter and I were really happy with the outcome of her butterfly themed fourth birthday party, so I thought I'd share the results.

I love birthday parties, but planning them does take some thinking on my part because I have quite a few constraints I need to work with:

1) I have a very low budget.
2) My house is too small to host a party.
3) We can't have an outdoor party during my daughter's birthday month.
4) I don't bake.

Here is what we came up with for this year:

Location: Local fitness club childcare room with amazing play structure, open play space, and tables for projects with an adjacent room with tables for food and cake.

Theme: Butterflies. Talked her out of princesses and into butterflies when we attended the Bonjour Butterfly Fancy Nancy ballet a few months before her birthday.

Activity segment of party: Kids had a blast on the play structure, but I wanted some activities set up at the tables to make sure every kid had something to do.

Table 1: Coloring center. Printed out some butterflies and bugs for kids to color.

Table 2: Pony beads with easy to use pony bracelets from Oriental Trading Company. Big hit! Her friends are still wearing their bracelets. Mini bottles of butterfly bubbles also from Oriental Trading Company.
Food: We ordered pizza for delivery and brought some junk food and juice boxes. Hey - that's what makes kids parties fun and easy, right?

Dessert: This is what really made the party look special - my friend Lindsey has an amazing company called Happiness Baked and made us custom cookies to match our paper plates. How does the birthday girl blow out candles if you serve cookies instead of cake? Her own personal mini cake of course!! Made by Lindsey with matching mini butterfly cookies decorating the cake.


Table: I ordered the butterfly paper products online and got lucky when the party store happened to have a matching mylar balloon.

Favors: Wings! I have a lot more amazing photos, but I'm not yet sure about including any kids' faces online. The kids running around in wings was really cute. My daughter's friends are all still using their wings in their dress up bins at home. We got multi-colored pastel wings for the girls, and black wings for the boys (mostly little 2 year old younger sibling boys). There was an infant girl at the party and she looked adorable in the wings too.

When looking for them I discovered the most amazing website for dress up supplies: Halo Heaven - super cute small company with really cheap deals and great customer service.

Birthday Girl Outfit: Very important part of any party, right? We ordered this headband from Halo Heaven when we ordered the wings in a darker pink color. She got one pair of wings for herself in a solid dark pink so that her wings would be different from the other girls.