Pretending is the best part of being a kid.

When we decorated my daughter’s room with birds a few years ago, she developed an imaginary friend named Tweet-Tweet.  He flies around our house causing minor mischief, sitting on her finger or head, and sometimes requiring his own snack.

I love the creativity that imaginary friends offer; the sweet innocence of it all.  When she asked for Tweet-Tweet to be the center of attention on her birthday, I couldn’t wait to oblige. What a fun way to honor this very fleeting part of childhood!

Imaginary Friend Invitations

When trying to make imaginary friends visible, Photoshop is your friend.  I had my little girl pose “holding” Tweet-Tweet, and used her descriptions to add him in and faded the image to make sure that it was evident that he was imaginary.  I then added bird shaped tags containing all of the party details.  She LOVES this picture, and keeps it beside her bed.  Aww…

Imaginary Friend Decorations

I lucked out in having a daughter whose imaginary friend is a bird.  Bird decorations are fairly easy to find.

In a moment of beautiful serendipity, I went looking for leftover vinyl bird outlines from the birthday girl’s room to use as a stencil in our art project (I’ll explain that in a moment) and discovered that I still had not only bird stickers remaining, but also letters that spelled the word “Imagine.”  Hooray!  I decided to turn it into the centerpiece of our room, saving myself all sorts of time and energy.

The kids dug around in our Easter decorations and pulled out all sorts of egg and duck items, which they happily scattered around the house – some of it landed in logical locations and some, not so logical.  The wooden duckling in the dog bed being my favorite kid-inspired decor.  Shadie didn’t appreciate it quite as much as I did.

A soundtrack of bird calls was the final touch of birdie goodness.

Imaginary Friend Games

Our crew is fairly easy to entertain so, to be honest, I didn’t plan any games until the afternoon of the party.

I picked up a bunch of bird shaped clips, and our first game was to go attack the dads and clip them on their clothes.  Simple, hysterical fun.  We then settled down to building game, with the kids trying to get all of the clips attached at the same time – much harder than it sounds.  

It should also be known that I secured my position as most-annoying-adult-on-the-planet by teaching the kids a loud (very loud) and boisterous rendition of the Chicken Dance, complete with shrill bird shaped whistles.  This was FUN!!!  … Annoying, but fun.

Imaginary Friend Craft

A friend suggested our craft, and once I heard her idea I had to follow through.  We made our own acrylic portraits of our imaginary friends.

We started by painting the background, then (after letting it dry with a bit of help from Dad’s air compressor) we used black paint to make silhouettes.  The older kids did theirs free-hand, but the younger ones used the vinyl sticker surrounds from wall decorations as stencils and simply painted over the whole thing with black paint.  They came out beautiful!

Imaginary Friend Food

My kids love planning for their birthdays, and this was no exception.  My youngest happily threw herself into baking 8 pork pies for her guests (they were originally going to be chicken pot pies, but she objected to eating birds on Tweet-Tweet’s special day – she had a good point).  Okay, so she basically just threw flour around and played with dough while I baked, but we had fun working together anyway.

Her cupcakes were decorated with sugar cookie birds, macaroon nests, and sugar pearl eggs – ignore my lousy piping on the frosting – I’m not sure why I chose that one to photograph.  The cookies were baked with a toothpick inside, so they were easy to stand up on top.

Recipes are on their way.

Imaginary Friend Goodie Bags

Our decorations and activities turned into gifts for our guests, and they all went home with a stuffed bird, their own imaginary friend painting, and their bird whistle.