A Simple Little House Birthday Theme for my 11 year old

There are a lot of ideas out there for cute cute cute Little House birthday parties! Believe me, I pinned some of them. But I ran into two problems (if you can really call anything in the party planning world a “problem”). First, we don’t really do “parties”. We don’t invite friends and we aren’t looking for activities most of the time. For our family, we are a party already! When my mom and sister join us (the most local family we have), we are already 10 people. I do choose a theme for the day, though, and we try to keep as much of the day on theme as possible. “Problem” 2, most of the little house parties I found online were for little girls, not tweens. While I did use many of those parties as inspiration, I wanted something a little older… and simpler.

I picked the Little House (or “Laura and Mary” as my kids call it) theme for my daughter. This past fall she told me she wanted a “homemaker” theme for her birthday. While I found that precious, you may be surprised (or not) to hear that there is just about nothing on Pinterest under “homemaker birthday party theme”. I found all sorts of tricks for cleaning my house and for being content as a homemaker, but nothing for party decorations or cake themes. (Shocker, right?) When I thought of the Little House books, it seemed a perfect fit. Laura and Mary were little homemakers in training from the time they were little, and while the theme did become more “Little House” and not as much “homemaker” specific, it still worked.

Birthday themes start with decorations the night before, but because a birthday in the Ingall’s family would have been pretty simply decorated, I stuck with the flowers and red check cloth on the table and the chalkboard sign I made. I had worked on sketching the prairie girl while I was away last weekend, but the “Have a Prairie good birthday” came to me while I was working on it Wednesday night. I wanted something to help her know what the theme actually was if she was up before we were Thursday morning.

Breakfast is the next big thematic moment… when a theme and time allow for it. Pancakes were the sure decision. I mixed up the batter the night before so I wouldn’t have to get up too early after my late night. Most of the pancakes were normal ovals (rather than circles to fit more on my skillet), but I did do some “picture” pancakes as well.

And my sister decided to make a banana “log cabin”. I figure it’s a lot like the way their cabin in Kansas looked before the roof was on. 🙂

Daddy always comes and takes the birthday kid out for lunch, so that isn’t themed. Sometimes we do a thematic activity, or coloring sheet. This year, I let her work on one of her sewing projects on my machine. It seemed appropriate.

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And she and her sister get bonnets. They have been asking for them for a while now and I figured this was the perfect time. Because of the women’s retreat being last weekend, I didn’t get both finished, and even this one still needs it’s ties, but she is pretty excited about them none the less. I used this tutorial from Jamie Sanders at Scattered Thoughts of a Crafty Mom.

Dinner was very thematic too. We started with a recipe for Oyster Soup from the Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker. Then we had rotisserie chicken (instead of me roasting one), corn bread and baked beans. And a simply decorated cake for dessert. I know that to be completely accurate the cake would probably have been dusted with powdered sugar or something instead of frosted with buttercream, but this was a compromise. 🙂 It was also supposed to have a layer of ice cream too, but it wasn’t working and it never did fully recover after I took it out. I am grateful that the children see my intentions more clearly than the end result!

Have you ever had a Little House birthday?

Gathering here.