She wants candy

Miss Whitney turned ten this month! Double digits! How exciting. She decided she wanted to have a candy-themed party here at home. The dental hygienist in me struggled with that...but we went for it anyway. Ten-year-olds are so fun and easy. (Or at least the four that we had over.) They had a great time getting a huge sugar high. And then I sent them home. I hope their moms will still be friends with me.

I don't have a pinterest account and don't spend much time on that site, but for party-planning, it is a MUST. Whit and I found a few ideas we liked and got to work.

We made a candy garland.

It is difficult to photograph.

And even more difficult to make without the strings getting all tangled up.

If I do another candy party, I'll skip this part.

We got plain white gift bags for the girls to decorate as their goody bag.

We poked holes in gumballs with metal skewers,

turning them into beads to make gumball necklaces.

I counted all 734 of those Skittles for the "Guess How Many Skittles" game.

The winner guessed 684. I was impressed.

And the BIG centerpiece was the candy bar.

I had so much fun putting it together.

It was just a little tricky knowing that only 4 girls were coming.

Hard to have a lot of variety without being left with a ton of candy.

Not that it's a big problem in our house...

My favorite part was this dum-dum topiary.

It took 3 1/2 bags of dum-dums to make that ball.

I originally bought ONE bag and had to keep going back to the store for me.

Lucky me, they were on sale at Harris Teeter, buy one get one free.

After anxiously waiting for 3 hours and 15 minutes between the end 

of school and the beginning of the party....

it was time!

The creative girlies did a great job decorating their bags.

Pizza dinner

Andrew designed an awesome candy treasure hunt for them.

It was rainy outside, so we had to move everything indoors.

We also had a little game show called, "Name That Candy."

Whitney rocked it.

We thought we had improvised a good indoor pinata hanger.

It survived a couple of hits, then came out of the ceiling. D'oh!

In the end, we resorted to Brandon holding it while standing on a ladder.

It worked.

Next we made our gumball necklaces.

They turned out super cute!

But were harder than we though they should be.

Getting the ribbon through those little holes was NOT easy.

Modeling their necklaces.

Can you tell which friend is new to this group? 

Whit decided we would do the candy bar in place of a birthday cake.

So instead of lighting a candle, Andrew lit a dum-dum on fire

while we sang, "Happy Birthday."

The girls made "candy cocktails" and had fun gobbling them up.

Then they had a few minutes to dance while we waited for parents.

Such a fun, fun night with Whit and her friends.