Last year, right after her princess party, Caroline asked for a ballerina party. I was really excited about that, since a winter ballerina party could be Nutcracker themed and there are SO many adorable possibilities there. Luckily I didn’t do much (any) planning early, so when she changed her mind and asked for a mermaid party instead I didn’t have to undo anything to throw a mermaid party.

I didn’t do as much as I have in the past (her winter fairy party was my favorite and also was CRAZY involved) but since the kids are bigger and more able to entertain themselves I just threw a bunch of balloons on the floor and they took care of the rest.

My theme was Undersea Wonderland, since obviously that’s where mermaids live. I had the very talented Becca from Jumping Jax make a custom invite and printable decorations for me. She is fast, creative and afordable (she also did Evan’s pirate party) and I highly recommend her.

Most of my party supplies came from Oriental Trading Company, as they usually do. This year, they gave me a budget and sent me a bunch of awesome stuff for free, although I ended up ordering twice as much stuff as they offered so I gave them a big pile of money anyway. Story of my party-planning life: budgets are not my strong point. But Caroline has an excellent party, everyone ate all my food and I would definitely say this was another successful birthday.

Decorations:

Mermaid treasure

Sparkle jelly fish made from Oriental Trading Co lanterns

Real life: pen on the wall of the stairs and my husband’s dirty socks in the railing

These giant balloons are my favorite birthday tradition

Glitter EVERYWHERE, but I love how these look

Food:

These are my gooey vanilla sparkle cookies, just renamed.

Ha ha ha ha School of Fish

Mermaid wands

Octopus rolls were an unexpected hit! It’s just crescent roll dough sheets cut into shapes with edible eyes stuck on.

Seaweed dip = spinach dip

Crabwiches! Eyes glued to toothpicks, sandwiches are ham and swiss

Sand dollar sugar cookies (same ones I made for Evan’s pirate party). Caroline cut these out herself. HERSELF. Like, my sister supervised but Caroline rolled and cut the dough entirely herself.

Cheese triangles as shark teeth

I bought a special starfish cookie cutter for these

Puff pastry cut into stars with cream cheese frosting filling, sprinkled with a little gold sugar to make them bumpy

Oyster cookies! I used two different kinds of Pepperidge Farm cookies (one is shortbread, one is coconut) and the same frosting I used on the cake

The “pearls” are chocolate candies from Oriental Trading Co.

IT IS NOT A DAVIS PARTY WITHOUT CUCUMBER SANDWICHES

I broke my own rule and made a cake. The cake itself is from a box, but I made cream cheese buttercream frosting.

I spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME looking for a mermaid to go on top…and found this one on our Christmas tree. It was Caroline’s ornament from last year.

The sand is graham cracker crumbs, the writing is a sparkle frosting pen, and I even bought special teal food coloring to make the frosting ocean-colored. Caroline picked the candles.

Rock candy from Oriental Trading Co

These were WAY cuter on Pinterest, but as much of a mess as they are the kids loved them and they looked cute on the tray

I sent E to buy “mermaid beer”. This was the best he could do. It was delicious though!

Blue punch mixed with Sprite = sea water. We also had pink mermaid punch, but I somehow forgot to take a photo.

Straws from Oriental Trading, flags from Jumping Jax

HERE’S A TIP. Don’t make sea glass candy. Melt Jolly Ranchers on parchment paper instead. Dust with powdered sugar. DONE. I mixed it with my jelly sharks because I ran out of bowls.

Fish sticks. Obviously.

Ocean Jello. Man, there was a LOT of blue food coloring at this party.

Fun:

Party favors

Make the sand/seashell ornaments

It needed some adult supervision but they all came out really cute

My sister drew this for me approximately 30 minutes before the guests showed up. She is very talented.

Waiting her turn…

The kids LOVED this game

Cake eating counts as an activity

So does mermaid punch

Cake time!

Happy 4th Birthday Mermaid Caroline!

Thank you to Oriental Trading Company for some of the supplies! I got the 4 balloon, the other balloons, the straws, the lanterns, the pearl chocolates, the necklaces, the wands, the straws, and the rock candy from them. Plus other stuff I’m forgetting and/or forgot to take pictures of (like the green crepe paper that turned my bookcase into a seaweed forest.

The shells and craft supplies are from Michael’s. All the fabric is left over from her previous parties, as are the lights and the crystal curtain behind the food table.

Caroline’s mermaid costume was her Halloween costume. It’s from Chasing Fireflies, a super awesome place to get costumes. Evan also wore his shark costume for part of the time, but we had to take it away when he started attacking guests. True story.

You can find links to most of the inspiration and products on my Pinterest board here. Not everything from my party is Pinterest-worthy. It’s not professional or super fancy or perfect and after 5 years of throwing parties for my kids I am TOTALLY OK with that. We had a wonderful time. I had a ton of family here and they were all so so so helpful. I could never have gotten even half this stuff done without them. An hour before the guests showed up I handed Baby Linc to my sister’s new fiance and abandoned them. He did great. Better than great. I hope I can convince him to come back for Caroline’s party again next year.

Thank you to EVERYONE who came and everyone who helps and everyone who made Caroline’s day so special.

As always, ask me if you have a question on where something came from or how I made something. Apologies for the weird colors/lighting on the photos, it got dark at like THREE O’CLOCK so this were taken at a crazy high ISO under overhead lights.