Party - Hawaiian style

At our house, the kids get b-day parties on their even year birthdays...that way we catch all the biggies...8, 12, 16, etc. Rachel's party was Friday night, and I'm just feeling recooped enough to write about it now.

She wanted to have a Luau - or Hawaiian theme. We started by having the kids all come in and have a 'surfing' picture taken.

Then the kids came in for dinner, where they had to order every part of their Hawaiian Haystacks (very traditional Hawaiian food, I know). Some of them ended up eating gravy with their knives, or just having gravy, pineapple and a cherry. Their dinner was served to them with style by Chris.You look HOT!

After dinner, we did a relay race, where each girl had to run to a chair, put on a lava-lava, grass skirt, coconut (or shell) bra (Rachel was SO embarrassed that I kept calling them bras), a lei, and a flower in their hair.

After the relay, they played a couple more games, and just 'hung out'. 12-13 yr. old girls are so funny. They danced around and had a great time. At one point, they were in teams dancing for each other, but I wanted everyone to get together, so I went in and had them play charades. I didn't know quite how it would go over, but they seemed to have a really good time. When we were done with the 1st group of clues, they wanted to do more, so I guess that was a good sign. It was lots of fun.

For their parting gift we gave them candy leis. Modeled here by Heidi Klum...or wait...no, it's just me.What was MY favorite part about the whole thing? It had to be the cake. It turned out so cute...if I do say so myself. I found the idea for these flower cupcakes here and I thought they looked like plumeria, so I had to make them to make the lei cake. I will definitely make these again. They were very little effort for how cute they turned out.

Thanks for having a birthday, Rachel. It was fun celebrating it with you (I wonder if she'll let me go to the next one...probably not).