Sasha's birthday

Our princess turned 3 years old!! Yesterday we had a really nice birthday party for her. All of her classmates came, but one, and I'm so thankful they did. They all made it incredibly special for her. I wanted to take a picture of the whole group together but didn't get a chance.
Here are some pics:

Ready for her friends to arrive:



Sasha loves Curious George, so we made him the theme of the party. We had George birthday hats, plates, cups, cake, etc. And we tied a bouquet of balloons to a bunch of bananas for the table centerpiece:





Camille and Haneet:



Marie and Frank:



Tayfun and Banu with their son Alp. (Haneet and Jennifer in the background)



Christina, Isabella and Sasha:



Talya and Mai:



Monica and Melissa with their children, Christina and Gavin:



Regina on the left, with her daughter Julia:



Here Isabel is tracing her daughter's hands. This was an art project that consisted of tracing the children's hands along the vines, making them look like flowers.



A variation of the "pin the tail on the donkey" game. Instead of pinning the tail, children pinned mittens, a birthday hat, balloons and bananas in a bowl, while blindfolded.



The children made treasure boxes. They glued a bunch of cool decorations onto a shoe box:




Since it was a Curious George theme party, we had to invite the Man with the Yellow Hat. James was great, and according to some guests, the "highlight of the party"! He even walked around town picking up pizza and coffee in that outfit.





I had found a nice Curious George cake design and printed it out to give to the bakers. However, our printer was running out of ink and instead of showing a light brown color as the background, it showed yellow and pink. When I took it to the bakery, I explained to them the situation with the ink, and told them we didn't want pink or yellow, just light brown! Apparently they didn't understand, because this is what we picked up! Oh well, Sasha loved it and it was actually really good.



One goal James and I want to try and achieve at each of her birthday parties, is that they not be all about the gifts. While we feel that it's important for her to receive gifts, we feel that we can make her parties special in other ways, and we want to teach her the importance of giving as well. So for her birthday, she made friendship bracelets for all her friends with each of their names. It was a fun activity for all of us. Here's a picture of hers:



We also found this cool website called Echoage (http://www.echoage.com/). The company's goal is to protect the environment. This is how it works: Parents don't bring any gifts to the party, instead, they have the chance to donate money online (if they want). The money donated gets divided in half. One half goes to buying one meaningful gift for Sasha, and the other half goes to a charity of our choice.
So, this is the gift that we were able to get for Sasha on behalf of all her friends:
She was so happy!!