Flamingo Birthday!

 Valor turned 6 this year, so we celebrated with a backyard flamingo pool party! With school starting and a crazy fall schedule ramping up, we knew this needed to serve as a fun "goodbye to summer," too.

For invitations, I watercolored a flamingo border and photo-copied it onto cardstock, on which I printed the invitations.

For decorations, I just made everything as pink and tropical as I could! Thankfully, we already had a lot of flamingo stuff because Valor’s room is all flamingos!

My house is all over ivy and plants anyway, so we just leaned into it. and added tons of bright pink balloons and other festive touches. (This flamingo garland was a nice touch.)

For party favors, I really cheated this year and just ordered these from Amazon. They ended up being PERFECT.

All the guests were invited to "Grab a lei and join the flock!" (Leis were from Oriental Trading Co.)

A few months ago, we stumbled across this ADORABLE flamingo pinata at Target, which was, of course a big hit! (Ha ha)

It looked stormy off in the distance, but it was actually a great swimming day! (Although, let's be honest--kids don't care how cold it is if they get to swim!!!) Oh, and we had several inflatables from Dollar Tree, including some fun flamingo blow-ups that added to the general vibe.

For food, we just grilled out burgers and hot dogs, but the pièce de résistance was the bright pink cake with cute topper (found here) and the edible painted macarons. For these, all I did was carve out a little flamingo stencil and then used pink and gold edible spray paint on each cookie. It turned out very striking and looked WAY fancy for the minor effort it was! I also "garnished" everything with little tiny flamingos and used these cute plates/napkins from Hobby Lobby.

I think it was a success! Happy birthday, Valor!