Shhh... Don't tell

Marxo's birthday party is this coming weekend and every time I asked her what type of party she wanted, she would reply with some sort of princess blah-dee-blah. Oh brother. That's what she's had for the last two years. Where's your creativity, little girl?!

I knew if I kept asking her over and over, she would eventually come up with something different and that moment arrived about 3 weeks ago. She said she wanted a butterfly party with sparkly butterfly balloons and cupcakes with butterflies on them. Praise the Lord! I latched onto that idea in a heartbeat!

Of course, like any good mom does in 2009, I immediately got on the internet to search for butterfly party ideas. God forbid I actually try to come up with something myself.

One of the people who posted their party details said that she gave out caterpillars as "favors" for the party. I absolutely couldn't pass that up, so I've spent the last two weeks researching how to order caterpillars and what type of device I should get as a butterfly cage. I could have gotten these. The cheapest "insect house" I could find on the internet. Or maybe some of these and then added some tulle to the top, which would have been a cheaper option, but I thought the mesh holes might be too big to hold in the caterpillars. So I finally settled on the cheapest, self-standing option: these! To which I now need to add tulle to the bottom.

(Btw, I must say that www.wishlist.com is the best thing ever. I have wishlists for our family, plus gift idea wishlists and in trying to plan this party, it became the best place to keep the links to all these party favor options! Looove It!)

The caterpillars showed up last night. I still don't have a firm headcount for the number of kids that are coming, and I thought it would be nice to give some to the preschool as well as the elementary school, so I ended up ordering the larger number of caterpillars: 60-70 caterpillars. The general consensus is that around 60% are guaranteed to turn into butterflies, so I wanted to make sure that there were at least 2 per child.

Lord. I think we ended up with around 90-100 of the little suckers! And the instructions stated that "You Must Transfer Larvae To Fresh Food ASAP." Since I bought the Classroom Refill Kit, it came with tiny, individual cups and each caterpillar was to get its own cup. But first, of course, I had to mix up the "food" and smash it down into each individual cup!

They only sent 60 cups, so there are several cups with two caterpillars in them. I think it will be a miracle if any of them survive, but they seem to do a pretty big business with these, they must work somehow!

So now I just have to sew tulle onto the bottoms of the food cover things (I got 20 of them!) and order the cupcakes and get some fruit to go along with the other snack food I've already gotten and cut out some cardboard petals to attach to the floral tubes that I got (the butterflies need to have food after they "hatch," afterall) and pick up the entire house and get ready for my parents and brother to get here tomorrow night. Oh, and find pictures from each year of Marxo's life and buy a book for the preschool so that we can present them on Friday morning. No problem, right?

Now, since none of Marxo's little classmates' parents read this blog, I figure it's alright to talk about this here. I don't want them to find out they'll be going home with some squirmy little critters and get scared about coming to the party, so let's keep this our little secret, Ok? :)