Half a party is all you get around here

My youngest two children are a boy and a girl, born thirteen days apart. We used to get away with telling them they were twins - one of whom had emerged a little sooner than the other (from a very, very...long labor.) This charade was especially helpful around birthdays - one party, one cake, one special dinner. We never felt bad because they seemed to always enjoy it.

Until recently.

Maybe it's the fact that Molly is a good foot taller now than her "twin" brother, or maybe that classical education we're giving them has finally got them to thinking, but this year Molly asked to have a solo birthday party. And Daniel was fine with it. He immediately started planning his own mannish,no-girls-allowed party. (Maybe that Barbie cake last year was the Tipping Point for him......)

In order to give them even more "individualism" (because that's just the kind of amazing mother I am), I suggested Molly have a half-birthday party so their parties would not be a mere 13 days apart (because that's just the kind of cheapskate, tired mother I am).

Once we got started, the ideas just started flowing (because that's just the kind of creative mother I am.) We sent out invitations that had been cut in half before inserting them in the envelopes. See if you can find all the half-brained ideas we came up with in the following pictures.

Not pictured: The half and half ice cream that topped those amazing black and white cookies, which we ate after a half-hearted attempt at singing Happy Birthday. For dinner we had half a bowl of taco soup, topped with fritos and colby jack cheese. (Get it? Colby jack cheese? Half colby and half monterey jack. I must admit, some of my half-baked ideas were lost on these 11 year old girls. But I didn't care. I knew. And it made me whole-ly happy :)

We told the girls to come half-dressed, but fortunately no one took us up on it. However, the girls were very clever in the way they dressed for the party. Here's big Sis Mary-Faith, who chose to half-way match.

Most of the girls were a little less bold. They wore their hair half-up/half-down, or one big earring and one smaller. One girl cut off one leg of her jeans so she had half-shorts/half pants. Several of them wore two different shoes. This girl wore 50% of her shoes.

For activities, we decided to set up game stations. The girls played for 15 minutes then stopped (half-way through!) and moved to another station to pick up where the previous players left off. They played partial games of Sorry, Apples to Apples, Phase 10, and Monopoly.



The girls were good sports when we interrupted their games in the middle, but when we tried to stop the American Girl movie half-way through, they were only partially accepting!

A good time was had by ALL. And Molly was 100%, fully pleased.