OH MAN... DU!

Wow, I've been busy! Yes, birthday time is upon us. Our youngest daughter is almost another year older and I feel like I've aged ten years in the past week!

I'm so tired of the same old party favor junk. Does anyone every really keep it? We usually throw the stuff away about an hour after the kids get it, if it makes it that long. I always try to come up with something a bit more useful. I'll have to post the details of that later but in the meantime I'll share the items I'm including in this year's goody bags for our youngest daughter's party.

First off, she wanted her theme to be Hello Kitty. Since Hello Kitty was born in Japan and is very popular in the East we decided to have mandu, Korean dumplings, for snacks. Hey, when isn't having mandu a good idea? Now for the goody bags... I wanted something that would be useful so we came up with the idea of felt food. I needed and easy to make felt food because we've invited 17 children. The choice was pretty clear... mandu. It seemed easier than it was but once I got the right amount of stuffing it went pretty smooth. I made 72 in all!!!!

We had already ordered Funchops for the goody bags and I picked up some chopsticks to use them with. Our youngest son struggles with his more expensive learning chopsticks but with the Funchops he can pick up anything and I'm hoping all the kids will enjoy them just as much. We're going to add Hello Kitty stickers to the suckers to go with the theme a bit more. We stamped Hello Kitty onto the chopsticks holders and they turned out okay. I'm not thrilled with them but they'll have to do. I wanted to fold origami chopstick holders with Hello Kitty paper but I couldn't find any with a small enough print. I'm thinking about adding something else to the plates. Maybe a bit of easily cut out black felt for sauce? Oh, and the plates were a great score at the local party store! I paid $8 for 20 plates! I didn't want to use bags and had thought about plastic disposable salad trays for presentation but I knew they would be broken in no time. When I found these plates I was thrilled! They are as thick as a play dishes and, in my opinion, look great.