Princess 5yr My daughter had a dress-up princess party for her 5-th birthday.  My main idea was to make party WITH her rather than FOR her.  We turned the entire process of getting ready for the party into a learning and fun experience for both of my kids.  We planned all activities together, prepared supply and to-do lists, and made sure we stayed on schedule.  I noticed that my son (who was seven at that time) started to fill a little left out because only girls were invited, and all of them were two years younger than him.  So, we found a few books about magic tricks in the library. He prepared a 20-minute magic show and was in the center of attention on the party.  INVITATIONS:  Two layers of construction paper: the text was printed out on the bottom layer, and the top layer was a castle with big gates. My daughter colored the castle pictures, cut them out, glued to the bottom layer of the invitation, and wrote in the names of the guests.  We also included driving directions and a short note to the parents, explaining that the girls could either come in their princess outfits or chose from ours. Writing all those names and addresses was a good exercise for my daughter's handwriting. ACTIVITIES: 1) Decorate the Crown (we made crowns for each girl out of silver paper, and they had to decorate them with stickers and fake gemstones).  2) Music cautions (as a safer version of Music chairs for little princesses).  3) Kiss the Prince (each girl was given a different color sticker, which she had to hold close to her lips and pretend she kisses the prince on the picture while blindfolded. The one whose sticker (ôkissö) was closer to the princes lips, won). 4) ôPhoto sessionö (before the party, we built a castle using card boxes, color and silver paper, and then during the party the girls posed in front of the castle and we took their pictures.  The castle was in all colors of the rainbow and with a big arc window in the middle (very pretty).  Later we donated it to my daughters daycare and they used it for puppet shows).  5) Free play (we had about two dozens of balloons for girls to play with during the party and to take some home after it.  Surprisingly, they enjoyed such a simple activity a lot). 6) Catch the Apple (each girl was given an apple hanged from a string; they had to bite a piece of it without using their hands. I was very surprised when each of them actually ate their apple AFTER the cake.) 7) Magic Show (presented by my son, see above).  CAKE: We made a cake in a shape of a castle.  For the towers, we used different shapes of ice cream cones covered with icing of different colors and attached to a regular round cake.  I had one tower for each child. PARTY FAVORS: Little fabric bags (from a crafts store) filled with stickers, candy, and little princess dolls. With the THANK YOU NOTES, we sent the pictures taken during the party. The kids looked very cute in their royal outfits. We had lots of fun both during the party and getting ready for it, so it felt as if the celebration lasted an entire month.