Make My Saturday Sweet - Blog Hop #11

The Make My Saturday Sweet blog hop is a hop for all family friendly blogs. There isn't a theme, so you don't have to link a special post. Simply link your blog's homepage and add the name of your blog to the linky below.

If you've been following my blog, then you would know that we recently celebrated Samantha's 12th birthday. I thought I'd share some photos and tell you a bit about the party.

Hubby gave Samantha permission to invite all her friends, so there were almost 30 kids at our house. Thankfully, he also helped with a lot of the preparations. Samantha also wanted to go ice-skating with two friends the following day, so we tried not to over-spend on the party.

We picked flowers from our garden and made three flower arrangements, one of irises and two of lavender. I also floated candles in glasses and a glass pie dish, which we lit once it got dark outside. These were things that I had in the home or garden, so they cost us nothing.

I made lots of popcorn with corn kernels from the bag. I added ¼ cup of kernels to a brown paper bag, folded the top over a couple of times, and put it in the microwave on high for less than 3 minutes. I learned this trick on Pinterest. I repeated this method until I had a very large bowl of popcorn, which I flavored with some sea salt and lots of powdered (icing) sugar.

South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation with its many cultures and faiths. Besides the diversity among the South African children, we also had 2 Brazilian girls, 1 Korean girl and my kids who are American/South African.

The food and drinks were put outside on our large balcony, so most of the mess stayed outside. We took care to make sure that the food was fine for our Muslim guests and also for the one vegetarian guest. We made home-made pizza for the main meal. The options were chicken, chicken and veggies, and only veggies.

For dessert, we had a chocolate fountain and a butterscotch fondue. I tried to make sure that the party food had some health to it. Besides the marshmallows, there were also lots of fruits for dipping.

I let Samantha be the game planner. The kids had a blast. They swam, played truth and dare, had Sing Star competitions on the Play Station 2, and when it got dark outside, they had a game of hide and seek, and generally just ran around screaming. The party ended at 9 pm, so I think the neighbors were glad about that!

Now on to the blog hop...




It's time for another Make My Saturday Sweet (M.M.S.S.) blog hop! Join Tina (your host) and Adriana (today's co-host) for this fun and easy hop. All family friendly blogs are welcome!

I'm looking for bloggers who would like to be a guest co-host on my Saturday hop and/or on my Wednesday hop from this coming week and onward. If you're interested, then please send an email to: morleychristina[at]gmail[dot]com

It would be really great if you liked my Facebook page too!

Here are the easy rules:

• Follow me on link 1 and today's co-host on link 2. (I will link my other blogs too, but I don't expect you to follow all of my blogs unless you want to.) If you leave a comment and your URL, I'll be sure to follow back.
• Link up your family friendly blog.
• Grab the button below and add it to your most recent post or on your side-bar.
• Share about this hop on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.
• Follow at least three new blogs and tell them you found them through this hop. And, they should follow back!

Blog Button Code:

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This is a blog hop!