Florida Life with Laura

We had a small get together to celebrate Elsa’s 9th birthday last weekend. She invited one friend (and the friend’s mom), her 2 sisters, and her brother’s girlfriend. I also invited one of my own friends, but she ended up sick that day and couldn’t make it unfortunately. So we ended up with a perfect group of 7 ladies, young and….less young.

We started off with a mimosa bar and lots of snacks, and helped ourselves to refills throughout the night.

Our first big activity was cookie making. Each of the 3 younger girls took turns mixing the ingredients for the dough base, and then when it was ready, it all went in a big bowl for all the guests to share.

The guests were each given a small bowl and a mini mixing spoon, and they used the dough base to mix up 3 or 4 of their own custom cookie creations. I completely forgot to take any photos of the finished cookies, but they were delicious!

While the cookies cycled through the oven, we moved onto our next activity. Craft time!

With over 20 years of experience and probably over 30 parties under my belt, I’m pretty darn good at planning out party activities and knowing what will work and what will not work well. This was a case of me getting it *dead wrong*. Let me explain.

I had a vision of leading the ladies through a basic craft (a keychain) step by step. Similar to how you go step by step through the process as a group at a paint party. However, for some reason I just could not get the group together. If anyone needed help with one step, I would pause to help them, but then others would then attempt to proceed without me. So then they would end up getting stuck and needing help too. Before I knew it, I had 6 girls at 6 different steps all needed help at the same time. So instead of it being a 20 minute craft that we completed together as a group, it ended up being me giving individual instruction to 6 people, and it got very overwhelming very quickly and we fell way off schedule.

If I could go back in time and redo craft hour, I would have changed a few things. First, I would have offered less options and less customizations. Cutting custom lengths and colors of cords took a really long time, especially since almost everyone needed help with the cutting. What would have worked better is if I made the color and style decisions ahead of time, pre-cut all the string, and made “kits”.

Second, instead of 3 crafts I should have kept it to 2. The second craft really ended up being a time suck. My intention was for craft #1 to be “learn to make a keychain” and craft #2 to be “now design your own keychain”. Instead, what happened is everyone saw this cute little tassel decoration I had hanging up as a sample craft, and they all loved it and wanted to make that instead of another keychain.

The problem with the one they choose it it required 13 cords cut to specific lengths, and also 3 wrap knots, which was the knot everyone struggled with the most making the sample keychain. This little thing was exhausting to get through with a group, and if I could go back in time, I would have never had it out as an example. It took almost an hour to get through this, where the keychains would have taken 5-10 minutes.

Everyone was so tired by the time craft time ended, none of us even got any photos of the finished products. Whoops.

Anyway…..the rest of the party went smoothly after that big fail.

We *quickly* rushed through a couple science experiments. First we made Ivory soap clouds in the microwave which the girls loved doing. We also did a super quick “cloud in a jar” experiment which I didn’t take any photos of.

Next we moved on to the part everyone, including me, had been waiting all night for. The spa!

Each guest had their own kit which included the following in no particular order: a foot bath with dried rose petals and fizzy bombs, a hand soak bowl with more fizzy bombs and stones at the bottom, a soft headband, flip flops, a mirror, 2 towels, a face mask, a foot mask, a foot brush/pumice stone, a glass nail file, a cuticle oil pen, some cuticle sticks, and some hand lotion. Everyone got to take every last bit of it home with them as well, other than the towels which went in the laundry, and the glass bowls because it would have been to hard to send them home safely.

But before we got to all that fun stuff, first everyone had to make their own sugar scrub to use during spa time.

Once the scrubs were mixed up and the foot baths were filled with water, we all sat down for an hour of relaxation, complete with “aromatherapy hot towels” which I made in the crock pot.

The most hilarious part was the animal face masks. I found them on Amazon, and they were quite a bit more expensive than regular masks, but I absolutely could not resist. It was worth it!

To finish off the night, we lined all our fresh-baked cookies on plates to hold candles. My daughter highly prefers we skip the happy birthday song, so we went straight for the blowing the candles out part.

Overall, it was a nice night! Sometimes I’m hard on myself when parties don’t work out exactly as I imagined them, but at the same time, I learned some great lessons that I can apply to future parties to make them even better. The spa part of the get together was by far the best part, and if I ever get a chance to do another spa party, I will for sure do so!