MAGGIE IS FIVE

Maggie celebrated her 5th Birthday on Saturday with 9 of her closest little friends. When all was said and done, the party was a hit. The preparation for the party was another story all together. It started when Maggie announced months before her birthday that she wanted to have a My Little Pony party. I immediately began to brainstorm about what we could do to keep the games and craft centered around the My Little Pony theme. Idea Number 1: Make beautiful horseshoes decorated with gems, glitter, etc. for the girls to take home and hang on their doors. Great idea, however, it did entail calling several horse supply stores to see if I could get discarded horseshoes. The supply stores referred me to some local stables, and the stable hands, in turn, put me in contact with several farriers. In the end, I drove out to a local stable, met the farrier, dug through his discarded horseshoes, selected a dozen, and off we went. They then had to be cleaned (which, Praise the Lord, Mark did for me), and spray painted. With that done, I was on to Idea Number 2: Pin the tail on the horse. In my mind, I envisioned a beautiful horse with a flowing mane for the girls to pin their tails on to. This entailed copying a template that I found on the Internet (Thank God for the Internet), onto a transparency, and then, using and overhead projector, tracing the horse onto a large piece of poster board....oh, but we don't have an overhead projector. Necessity is the mother of invention. I had to enlist the help of the boys who held flashlights up to the transparency while I traced. Idea number 3: Perhaps this was my most grandiose idea yet. I thought that my mom and I could make each of the girls her own little hobby horse. We could have a little relay race using the horses and then each girl could take her own horse home. I won't even go into the all the details of the fiasco that surrounded the making of these little gems, but to suffice it to say, my mom pulled through, and made all the horses. She even enlisted the help of her husband. His job was to stuff the ears. I don't know what I would have done without her help in all of this. In the end, we had 10 of the cutest pink hobby horses that you ever wanted to see. And the girls were elated to take home their own horse. It was a great party. The preparation was killer, but the end result was worth it. The things we do for our children......but I would have it no other way.