Celebrate Good Times....and choose to be happy!

Holy Cow! It is 2014 already! I am sure most folks are already making their New Years Resolutions. I am no different. My first order of business is to choose to be happy and have more fun. I have already started working on that.

I put my crafty hat back on this week. Kaijah turned 12 and I brought back an old tradition that went away when I started trying to be less wasteful. I decided to find a way to decorate her door with out paper and streamers. I came up with a quick little craft. I used an old curtain rod, ribbon, beads, and any other colorful item I could find to mimic streamers. I bunched up the ribbon in like colors and "tied" them off with a rubber band. I hot glued them to the rod (I like the rainbow effect). I then just started gluing everything else to it. I think it came out pretty awesome. Now I can reuse this to decorate for future birthdays. I added my Happy Birthday Garland to make it a little more special. I referenced the "Merry Christmas" version here which links to the tute on an awesome blog I read. It was my inspiration for my birthday one.

Note: check to see if all your doors are the same size or you will have to get creative like me when hanging it. I had to tack nails to the top of her door and smoosh the rod behind them.

Since I had the wonderful crafty hat on, I kept going with the craft-craziness. I decided to fulfill my kids dream of having a New Years Eve party. Kairah helped me with the planning, shopping, and prepping. The very first thing we did after putting our "wish list" together was to look around the house and see what we already had and determine what we need. I wanted to keep the price tag low. I think we did great keeping a low budget and putting together a pretty nice family shindig.

We decided to have a photo booth with props. I attempted to find things on the internet to print, but fortunately nothing was "working." So, I had to come up with my own designs and I honestly think it came out way better than I expected. I used my Cricut for the numbers, stars and gold part of the crown, but everything else was free hand. We did purchase some of the card stock for the project, but everything else I had on hand. We used cake-pop sticks for the handles. The back drop was a plastic table cloth, Christmas bows and garland (clearance-woot woot!). We had so much fun taking pictures. A friend of mine even came over to test it out. (I think I might take the props to my volunteer job and see how much fun we can have)

I made this sparkling "Happy New Year" bunting with my Cricut. It was easy enough. Just some squares, letters, ribbon and tape.

We had some simple snacks: cocktail weenies, homemade chocolate chip cookies, fruit, candy, and sparkling lemonade (lemonade and ginger ale). I put foil down for some fun (the most wasteful thing I did, but its recyclable) and added confetti. The girls enjoyed eating off nice glass plates and drinking out of fancy glasses.

 Most of the night we just watched movies. I am sure I could have found some way to stream a New Years party on the internet, but we were content with movies. In between, we would play with the photo booth, party horns, and confetti. I think my daughters' favorite part of the night was the balloon drop. We cut a plastic table cloth in half and tacked it to the ceiling. We tried to use duct tape on one corner each (where we put the pull string), but it did not hold very well. We filled each table cloth piece with balloons and confetti, and added a pull string with ribbon and duct tape.

It was not perfect, but they loved it.   

This is just a brief picture of what I plan to do to be happy. I am making conscience decisions daily to choose to be happy. On Monday, I chose to not let bad news ruin my day and had a wonderful day volunteering instead of working a paid job (for now...I have a new start date soon). Tuesday, I chose to not be upset about the two children who did not want to have fun for part of the day. Instead, I had a great time with my other two daughters who went bowling with me. I am choosing to be happy this year. I am choosing to make things as fun as I possibly can. That is my number 1 resolution in 2014.

BTW keeping with my no waste policy, I am keeping all of my decorations for future NYE parties. I am also going to use the confetti in a future project. The only other waste besides the foil will be the balloons after we get lots of play time with them.