Making Merry Memories: A Pretend Party

I love the way that children can invent a world around them with their imaginations. My daughter is the biggest pretender in our family, perhaps the biggest pretender I've ever known. She can spend hours playing and playing and playing. Trying to call her out of her world can be difficult because when she is pretending, she is so fully engaged in her make-believe world that she honestly does not hear me speak to her from two feet away.

She especially loves all her tiny toys, (thus the inspiration for her tiny birthday party). A few days ago, she and her friend were playing with these little toys in her room when my girl announced that it was Bolt's birthday, and they needed to throw a party for her. (Bolt is the small white dog in the above picture). So the girls ran to the dress up box and found some hats to wear, because a birthday party needs a hat, after all. They found a tiny doll shoe and put it on Bolt's head to act as her party hat. They set up little games in her room for the party, and were having a great time.

And since I love to support creative play, I asked the girls if they would like to make cupcakes for the birthday party. Yes, they would.

I whipped up a quick batch of chocolate cupcakes and mixed up five different colours of icing, since the girls had requested lots of 'colour choices' to decorate with.

I ransacked the baking cupboard and my pantry looking for things they could use to decorate with, and came up with a few leftover pink and red sprinkles from the most recent birthday party, some green sugar from St. Patrick's Day, a few jelly beans, chocolate chips, and some mini marshmallows --- quite enough for creative cupcake decorating!

The girls decorated and decorated for the better part of an hour. When they were done we had an amazing tower of treats.