Tyra's Under the Sea Party

Tyra has loved to plan a party from the time she was old enough to hold a pencil and a notebook for her lists. She spends a lot of time thinking about the invitations, who to invite, the decorations, and the activities. I enjoy the preparations myself, and love to follow her lead. This year there was an even better incentive, having a need to clean up the edges of my house a little more. I spent quite a bit of time getting rid of the broken bits of packing peanuts that were all over the back of the sunroom, and cleaned out and organized all the toys. I still have a basket full of small items to return to the rightful toy bins and game boxes, but many many hours of cleaning it out have made a difference!
Back to the party, I'm going to make Tyra write about it, but I'm putting up the pictures of the cake, friends, and decorations. A word about store-bought frosting. We all know it's the worst type of thing to put into your body: corn syrup and partially-hydrogenated oil. Not to mention it doesn't really taste very good. But things were busy and I decided to buy a container of it to frost the cake and then make thicker stuff for the decorating. It says right on the package that it frosts a 2 layer cake. All I can say is, when I spread the frosting on the cake it just OOZED off the edges and PUDDLED on the cardboard. I scooped it up and stuck it back on top and put it in the fridge. Then I had to take it out for short periods of time to add the words, then the seaweed, then the "gravel" then the fish. It was definitely NOT a time saver to have gone with that frosting! Luckily it sort of worked to shove strips of paper under the edges of the cake to cover up the grease stains on the cardboard! And luckily Tyra was feeling oh so happy and forgiving and said she loved it any way.
The other pictures show her "seaweed" and "jellyfish" decorations, and the pin-the-clownfish-on-the-anemone game/decoration.
As for the party, there was a lot of screaming and giggling, so I think it was success!