Annalise's Panda Party

Annalise is turning 9 this week and we had a "friend party" last weekend.  She loves pandas and is interested in Asia, so her theme was officially panda, but in reality it was an Asian Fusion!  The fabulous thing about party planning with Annalise is that she has a lot of ideas and we were able to use a lot of them.

For decorations, we took advantage of our exposed trusses and hung homemade paper lanterns and paper umbrellas.  We had some paper umbrellas, but the ones pictured are ones I bought at garage sales - total cost $2 - actually the construction paper for the lanterns was a garage sale find too that I was willing to pay for, but the seller was so eager to be rid of it she insisted I take it for free! 

The puffy balls on a ribbon were Dollar Tree decorations and the wall hangings are mine.  The rose one actually says something in Chinese about birthdays - I was in China on my 24th birthday.

The goodie take-out boxes.

She requested California rolls - we got a big pack of chopsticks too.  I also made chicken nuggets, so some kids ate chicken nuggets with chopsticks!  Also pictured Lychee juice boxes from South Korea and Mandarin Oranges.

Her cake is called "Pandas at the Beach".  She made the pandas out of tootsie rolls (we had an excess of vanilla tootsie rolls from a station event).  The food in the picnic basket is bamboo.  Natalie helped her make some of the details.

We played some games that were tweaked to fit the theme, but I'll post them another time if I can find the time!