Party Pictures!

Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave and impossible to forget.

~ Unknown

Sunday night was Ana's going-away party.  It was seven intense hours of setting up, partying, and cleaning up.  Here are some pictures for you:

We rented a beautiful room and decorated it in blues and pinks.  Half of the tables had balloon centerpieces.

And the other half had these (artificial) floral arrangements.

We hung accordion-style lanterns over the dance floor.

Here's a view of the room from the other side.

In the background of the picture above, you can make out this sign:

Notice the butterfly decals on the windows?

We also set up a special table for the children, with small toys, coloring books and crayons.

One of the main activities of the night was picture taking.  We set up a photo area (complete with butterflies) and most everyone had pictures taken with Ana.  We printed 2 copies of each picture - one for the guest and one for Ana's photo album.  People also wrote notes to Ana on colored index cards, which we included with their pictures in her album.

Here is a shot of Christine, our intrepid photographer, with Ana - Christine and her husband worked miracles to get the pictures taken, printed and distributed throughout all the chaos!

My picture with Ana:

My husband's picture with Ana:  

For the children's table, I printed a bunch of butterfly coloring pages onto pieces of card stock - we saved the pictures that the children colored to put in Ana's album too!

(I stood behind Christine when she was taking this picture and made faces and acted silly and put bunny ears on Christine - but I could not get that little girl to crack a smile for anything...  Apparently, in her world, picture-taking is a very serious business.)  

Ana didn't spend ALL of her night in front of the bed sheet - she was able to get around and talk with her guests.  You can also see here in the background that we had a D.J. - services volunteered for Ana.  :)

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the food - but there was a huge buffet table groaning with chicken and mole, tamales, rice and beans and other delicious foods.  All made by hand with love by Ana's friends.

And we had a cake for dessert.

It looks big, doesn't it?  By the end of the night there was not a single piece left!  ;)

Oh, and if you are wondering about her dress, she couldn't make up her mind between wearing her fuchsia dress or her blue dress, so she decided to change half-way through the party and wear them both!  ;)

Finally, my camera has about 80 shots like these:  

Pictures of Ana and the people who love her....  

It was a very special night for everyone!  :)