Beach Bash Birthday

A few weeks ago my 2nd born daughter turned 5. It always seems that 5 is a significant age. I guess it's because 5 is the age where most children leave home to embark on the journey of "school". Since we homeschool this is not the case for us, but I still find that turning 5 makes a big difference in a child or at least to mom :).

I really wanted to have a garden party with butterflies, flowers and bugs as the theme, but this little girl was not interested. I even started researching ideas on the 'net hoping she'd be okay with it. I have a flower cake pan and really wanted to use it. But she made up her mind that she wanted a beach party with themed cake and all the trimmings. Since I'd done a beach party for my oldest daughter a few years ago, I knew it was a pretty easy party so I just gave in and let her have her pick this time.

I usually make the cake for my children. It's something my mom always did and it was special to me. I'm not very good at it, but this time I tried not to stress over it. I even used canned icing instead of making my own. Let me tell you that relieved some stress for me. I'm not sure why because it's not that hard to make icing. But I guess it's the little things, huh?

Here's the cake and some other simple decorating ideas:

I decorated the whole cake using white icing. Then I added blue on one side for the water. The other side is the sand using crumbled vanilla wafers. My daughter got to do that part (in a ziploc bag of course :)

Polly Pocket dolls work well on this cake. One is laying on a towel made from fruit stripe gum. The other girl is in an inner tube made from a gummy life saver. I used round gum balls for beach balls. I had a few fish and other ocean animals that I added.

I also made the little beach umbrella out of scrapbook paper and a toothpick.

For decorating the tables, I used some beach buckets and shovels to serve the chips and dip.   Sand toys worked nicely as decorations on the tables on top of the blue tablecloths. 

We had the party outside since it was a nice day.  We had a hula hoop contest, water relay, water balloon toss, and the limbo.