Planning a kid’s birthday party is a very tedious task. My daughter just recently held her 6th birthday party, I,  together with the help from my mom, our yaya, and hubby,  did all the planning, cooking, baking, decoration, games and what not that is needed to make a children’s party an exciting one.

I will share to you here my experience in the preparation, after which, I feel I can already offer a children’s party coordinator/planner service 😛 (lol)

First, we locked on a theme, the first option was Frozen, but ever since the RIO 2 movie came out, the birthday girl forgot all about Elsa and Anna and insisted we have a Rio themed party. She loved the character “Jewel” so much.

Then I have to secure a venue, I already am fixed on the idea of a beach birthday party since it is already summer here in HK, plus the venue would be much cheaper, the time – longer and space – bigger than any rented rooms or playrooms around HK. I chose Shek-O beach since it is one of the closest beach in HK Island with BBQ setup. So I reserved a space in one of the paid BBQ areas at Shek-O beach. Around this month, the bbq pit rental is about HK$250/bbq pit. I secured about 4 bbq pit/space for the number of visitors I am inviting. We got the one that is the closest to the beach. The place is pretty neat, lots of tables and chairs, the shed is better than the others, and the owners are very accommodating. There are extra fees if you want to use their cooler with ice, or buy charcoal and bbq net from them. They would even set up the bbq pit for you and get the charcoal going. I had to go to the venue 2 weeks prior to my desired date to book it, i think a week before is fine but I just wanted to make sure since the beach is pretty full during summer. Here is the contact number of the venue we got – +852 91923535.

 

 

 

 

 

Then, I started with the costume. Here is the doodle design that I envisioned for the costume.

The only thing that is not followed here is the head dress and the way the tail is attached to the skirt and the feather effect on the wings. But overall, turned out great.

It was fun to make and only cost me a few dollars 😀

Here is the final product:

 

Then we started working on the piñata. Janna and i did it from scratch.

We used 2 balloons as the mold for the head and the body for the paper mache. It was quite a messy ordeal and it took us almost 2 weeks for the paper mache to fully dry, afterwards we decorated it with blue crepe papers.

The neck and the beak, as well as the wings were made from recycled grocery boxes. Janna helped sticking the crepe papers and she also painted the beak black.

Here’s the final product.

I think we enjoyed making this that we put a couple of layers too much that made it quite hard to break. But the kids as well as the adults enjoyed it none the less 😀

 

Then we did the invitations, I designed it myself and my mom helped in cutting it. Printed in our house. Then we mailed it to friends.

 

 

 

 

 

Next are the goodie bags. Since my mom is coming to HK from the Philippines, I asked her to bring us some of the famous and favourite snacks from the Philippines. Not only is it cheaper, but it will be more enjoyable for the guests who I’m sure misses the things/food from our own country.

 

 

The bags I also did and sewed myself. Just a few dollars worth of fabric (some of the fabrics are even left overs from my previous projects), ribbon and stitching skills, a printed thank you tags, and the goodie and prize bags are ready to go.

What’s inside? Lollipops, jellyace, plastic balloons, corn bits, boy bawang, ding dong nuts, flat tops, pastillas, hanny, chocnut, loom bands creations, and a bunch of different surprise gifts per bag.

 

We also prepared a bunch of games, although due to limited time, we were not able to do all the games. here are the instruction boards I did per game.

 

 

 

 

We also had the all time favourite “bring me” game.

For the decoration, we just blew some balloons and decorated the place and I made and had a tarpaulin printed that served as the backdrop for the cake table setting.

Too bad that i wasn’t able to get a good photo of the cake table setup.

 

 

Then here is the cake that i made for her. Chocolate flavoured fondant cake. I didn’t have a good photo of it too I also did cake pops and cupcakes but unfortunately, no photo to show for it as well

 

For the rest of the food, we just had different kinds of meat for BBQ and grilling ( Chicken wings, Liempo, BBQ pork on stick, Hotdogs with mallows on stick, and Tilapia fish). We just brought raw marinated meat and cooked it on the venue so it is served hot and freshly cooked. We also added chicken buckets from Jollibee. Carbo sources are rice, spaghetti and Pancit canton/bihon. We also had shrimp sinigang for our soup. I also prepared Mango ice candy as a welcome refreshment. (too bad no good photo of the food table setup too, everyone is so busy having a good time

But the most fun part is the swimming time! Both the adult and the kids loved the waves and the weather was perfect!

 

 

Overall, the celebration was a success and the birthday girl was so happy specially with all the gifts 😀

You might think that it is quite hard to get all these things out there, well, what we did is we rented a cargo van, and the fare is about HK$150 during day time from Quarry bay to Shek-O beach, and about HK$200 for night time from the beach back to Quarry bay.

Here’s their contact number – +852 905 95606