One more birthday recap, and then I'll box it all up until next year

Since I shared some of the details of Liam's birthday party, I thought it would be only fair to share some of Mallory's mermaid party, which was conveniently taking place at the other end of the table.Mallory got her wish and wore her Ariel shirt (even though it is starting to unravel!) and had Ariel cupcakes, Ariel partyware, and an Ariel party game to play. There just isn't a lot of generic mermaid stuff out there. Having said that... the Ariel stuff was not all easy to find. This is the 20th anniversary of The Little Mermaid's release, and this line has been discontinued (the new Disney lines, The Princess and the Frog and the generic 'Disney Princesses', are everywhere instead.) So I had to piece all this stuff together from eBay, etc. This resulted in a couple of surprises, such as the Ariel confetti which I was shocked to see when it arrived because the mermaid pieces were at least 3 inches long. Not really 'confetti' in my book!After going to a superhero birthday (involving dress-up) and a princess party (involving dress-up), Mallory now believes that all birthday parties involve costumes, and she wanted to dress up as a mermaid. I started to explain to her that birthdays are not synonymous with costumes but she wasn't buying it. And to be fair, we had the pirate skullcaps and swords for the boys, so I didn't want to leave the girls out. That led to the sewing of a simple mermaid tail for each of the girls (thank goodness for easy instructions found online and the bargain bin at the fabric store!) The backlighting here kind of ruins the effect, but you get the idea.When the girls arrived, they painted treasure chests and decorated them with jewels. The boys were busy crafting foam pirate ships at the time.A shot of Mallory's end of the table.Singing 'Happy Birthday' to her. She was a bit spooked by the candle flame and needed some assistance to get it blown out - she was leery of getting too close to it.One of the stops on the treasure hunt downstairs was in this corner of the room that we decorated with blue recycling bag streamers and put a blue tarp down on the floor to make a 'mermaid grotto'. This was a really lame effort to do something comparable to the pirate ship, but we put the water table inside, filled with sand and seashells and some iridescent marbles, and the girls quite liked it.

And with that... I am all birthday'd out. The full photo set is on Flickr, and I am off to take a really long nap.