Fif-TEA-eth Surprise Party

Sorry for the grainy picture. I don't know how to use my camera yet.

One of the reasons my blog posts have been few and far between lately, is that a lot of my time and energy was focused on a surprise 50th birthday celebration I was helping throw for my wonderful MIL.

The planning crew, which included SIL M and AIL, decided the theme would be "Tea Party". There's this wonderful restaurant near our place called "The Tea Room" which MIL frequents and loves, so we ran with that idea.

The hardest part of the planning process was not accidentally slipping about the party! I sooo wanted to post pictures of the invitations and some ideas we had, but I know she reads this blog!

The party was a complete success and we all had a wonderful time wearing pearls and eating little desserts.

Any words I write won't do the party justice, so I've compiled a few of my favorite pictures:

Picture of the invitation.  I made a little pocket to insert a real tea bag with each invite.

 

We made a few poms to hang around the room. 

In hindsight, I wish I spent a little more time on the banner.  This was one of the last projects we worked on the night before the party.

 We bought teapots and pearl necklaces to use for centerpieces.

 

 We had four tables, and since there are 4 kids in the family, we named each table after each of them.  There were escort cards to direct people to whichever table they were assigned to.

Sorry for the sad picture of the escort cards.  By the time I got around to taking the picture, most of them were gone!

A dear friend, L, let us borrow her beautiful teacup collection, so each guest had their own teacup!

And of course, there had to be a photobooth! All the guests took turns taking pictures with the guest of honor at the photobooth. 

My mom and I had decided to take a few pictures together while waiting for the guest of honor to arrive.

Here's another silly one with me and SIL M!

 All the pictures from the photobooth, will be printed and pasted into the beautiful scrapbook SIL M created.  All the guests were also requested to write a message to be included in the scrapbook.

Dessert buffet -- yum!!!

 One of the games SIL M came up with we called "What's my Flavor?" in which we passed around unmarked teabags and had each guest guess what tea flavor it was just by smelling it.  The person with the most correct won a prize.  The game was a lot harder than it sounds.

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We all had a great time and my wonderful MIL was truly surprised!