Celebrating It's a Small World style!

Obviously, we are a Disney family (mostly because of me), and even though my daughter Ella has recently all but abandoned Disney Junior in favor of Nick Junior, she still loves the Disney parks.  For her 3rd birthday, she chose to theme it after one of her park favorites- It's a Small World!  I had a lot of fun putting it together for her.

Themed parties have been my thing since I was a kid myself!  I came up with a lot of my own parties growing up and used to love to check out party planning books from the library.

If this had been a party for a slightly older child, I think I would have gone with stations representing different countries, but I wanted to come up with a simple activity for toddlers.  My mom reminded me of something she'd done for one of my sister's parties when we were little, so a day or two before, Ella and and I dyed a bunch of dried pasta a variety of different colors that could be spooled onto yarn. I know colorful necklaces don't have that much to do with the ride, but it worked.  To dye the pasta, we divided it into several Ziplock baggies and poured in several drops of food coloring and a dash of hand sanitizer. Ella loved getting to shake the bags.  Then we laid them flat to dry over night.

Ta da! Arts and crafts table!

I also rented a children's party table from a local bounce house company and bought a nice gold and white table cloth.

For the door decorations, I cut out geometric shapes from construction paper and used letter stickers and punch out shapes to write hello in different languages like the signs on the ride:

I also made a food table poster recreating the display at the entrance to the ride at Disneyland.  I cut out the flags and used letter stickers again.  I even found cut-outs of international children at Michael's.

I added my own It's a Small World doll and food labels using the clockface that I made myself on my computer.  For fun, I bought a bunch of international treats from World Market- an idea I came across online.  Yum!  Since Ella had mentioned wanting a tea party, we also served tea sandwiches made by my mother-in-law on a tiered tray, and pre-made tossed salad and quiche.  The kids got chocolate milk and could even decorate these paper tea cups I found on Amazon with Small World stickers I found on Etsy.

 Target had these awesome create your own banner flags that happened to be in the right color scheme, and I used glittery stick on letters to write, "Happy Birthday, Ella!" Then I topped it off with hot air balloon Japanese lanterns that I found on Amazon.  We left them up long after the party.  They've been falling down in the middle of the night one by one.  After 5 months, there are 3 left standing!  Well, hanging anyway.

Party favors were little pretend passports with stampers and colorful little maracas.  I tried to get a parade going with the kids, but it ended up being just me and Ella marching around the house.  My husband has set up the coolest sound system in our home- we can actually program different music to play throughout the house, and he set it up so that each room was at a different part of the music creating the effect of going through the ride.  It was so cool!  We even had the clock music and sound effects playing on the porch.

Oh- I forgot to tell you about the cake! We had a custom cake created for us by Suzie Cakes and they did a fabulous job with a complicated request:

All in all, I think everyone had a great time!  I can't wait to come up with more parties.  And I've done plenty of Disney parties in the past, so I can probably make this into a series.  Ella says next year she wants a PJ Masks party at a gym place, and even though her birthday isn't until December, my mind is already buzzing with ideas.  Seeya next time!