Dora birthday party - my baby turned 3!!!

I can't believe it's been three years since giving birth to my beautiful baby girl, Alexa!  The time flew by way too fast.  But to commemorate her 3rd birthday we decided to have a big party for her.  Since this is the first birthday she seemed to understand we decided to invite all of her friends.  Little did I know that they would ALL come!

We ended up having 18 kids and 23 adults!  Being that my profession is an event planner I was quite nervous about the party.  I wanted to make sure it all went smoothly and everyone had a great time.  Plus, Alexa was so excited about her party.  Every day for about two weeks prior she would ask when her party was and she made me list all of her friends that were coming!

The theme for the party was Dora since Alexa is obsessed with Dora.  Instead of buying a lot of Dora decorations, which can be very costly, I decided to do things a little different.  Since Dora wears pink and orange and her backpack is purple I decided to use all of those colors.  I bought pink and orange cups and put Dora stickers on them.  I let Alexa help me so she was involved in it.  I then alternated those cups when putting them out.

I also bought pink and orange plates and alternated them too.  And the same with the napkins.

Mike decided to make the cake and cupcakes and my mother in law decorated the cake while Alexa helped decorate the cupcakes.

Then I went to our local party store and got 21 balloons in pink, orange, and purple.  That was a HUGE hit with the kids!  They all loved the fact that there were balloons everywhere and they could play with them all day!

To entertain the kids I brought in several kid sized tables and covered them each with table cloths that could be drawn on.  I then put out several cups of crayons on each of the tables.  The kids loved that idea also!  (I just hope none of them went home thinking they could draw on mom and dad's tables...)

Once everyone arrived and they had a chance to color a bit I then brought out a box of foam stickies and spread them on the tables.  I bought a foam door hanger for each child and let them decorate them however they wanted.

After that lunch arrived.  We ordered pizzas for the adults and I made frozen peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for the kids.  Frozen ones are great because kids think it's a dessert and mom's love it because they don't make a mess!

After lunch we decided to play pin the tail on the donkey.  Maybe not the best game choice for two and three year olds, as they didn't seem to understand the concept, but they did have fun wearing the mask and being spun around!

After that Alexa opened her gifts.  She got so many great gifts from all of her friends and she was even nice enough to let her friends help her open the gifts.  I was so proud of her!

Then the finale of the day was the Dora pinata.  Thankfully it was a nice day so we were able to hang it on a tree outside.  The pinata had strings for the kids to pull to get the candy out.  But since it was nice out we decided to pull out a broom handle and let the kids hit away!  Amazingly...nobody got hurt!

All in all it was a great day and I think everyone left after having a great time!