How to throw sunny day party at home
Sunny Day is one of Nick Junior’s pre-school shows focused on the entrepreneur spirit of a young girl named Sunny, who’s a 10-year-old hairstylist and owns her own hair salon. Sunny and her friends are all from a town called Friendly Falls. (And it just so happens that they all have their own beauty knack as well.)
Anywho, my house party application got accepted a few weeks before my daughter’s 6th birthday, but that wasn’t going to stop me from throwing an amazing party! (I figured she’d just have an early birthday celebration with her friends, and we’d do something special for her actual birthday, just me, her and her dad.)
But when my mom decided she didn’t want any parties in her house on her new carpet, *cue eye rolling* I was left with two options: cancel and disappoint my daughter or find a new venue. While finding a new venue meant I’d have to pay way more out of pocket than I had expected to host our party, disappointing my daughter wasn’t an option!
Long story short, I settled on a two-bedroom for sleep with a pillow at night here in NYC, as our new venue and dived straight into planning. I used Numbers (similar to Excel) on my MacBook to plan our Sunny Day Party like shown below, but I’ll include a printable party planning sheet at the end of this post in case you’re not excel/numbers savvy.
Now if you knew me personally, you’d know I love planning parties and events, so it’s really easy for me to think things through without forgetting the important stuff and having multiple anxiety attacks. Lol After I reserved our two-bedroom suite at Hotel Beacon I studied their living room photos and videos so I could plan out where each station would go.
By the time I got to the hotel, I already knew where everything would be and all I had to do was lay it all out. (If I had waited until I got to our room to figure this stuff out, we probably would have never finished on time! Lol And um, my girls were eating cake, way off schedule at 10pm, even though I prepped everything in advance, so imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t planned at all. Lol)
Note: I only used the living room and kitchen for our party. The bedrooms were off limits to the girls once they put their jackets and shoes away. This made it easier to contain the mess to one area, so clean up would be easier, and I didn’t have girls running back and forth through the rooms. Plus I could easily supervise them all in one room.
STEP 1: SET UP THE SIGNING IN AREA
Sooo, the bag I packed with all our stuff was extremely heavy and full. (And it was one of those TJ Maxx / Home Goods humongous tote bags. Lol) So I had originally decided to scrap the idea of having the girls sign in, because who the hell was gonna stuff our already overstuffed bag with a darn clipboard just for them to write their name? Lol Not I says the cat. But when I got to the hotel, I noticed they had notepads and pens, so I grabbed one and placed it in the kitchen, by the front door, so the girls could sign in for their appointments.
This literally took like a few seconds to do. And then I just numbered it from 1 to 4 and sectioned it off, so the girls didn’t get crazy and take up a whole page just for their first letter. Lol
STEP 2: SET UP THE WAITING AREA
The waiting area was even easier to set up because all I had to do was put out the board games.I did move the hotel binder to the bottom of the table though, so it was out of the way. And my laptop (what I used to play some background music) was set up away from the girls so they didn’t accidentally push it over. But because we were in a two-bedroom suite at a hotel and had a living room, our waiting room was already furnished with a couch, and lots of space for the girls to play their games. (Funny enough, this is why I decided to have our Sunny Day party at a hotel. Not only did I not have to clean the entire place afterward, I also didn’t have to rent chairs or tables, or rearrange anything, like I would have had to at a normal party venue.)
STEP 3: SET UP THE NAILS & FACIALS STATION
When I planned out our Sunny Day Party, I knew I wanted our mini beauty salon to feel like a real salon experience. So I brought the heart-shaped container with me then filled it with water so I could have the girls pretend to soak their hands. (You know, like an actual manicure.) The container was actually something we already had at home, but you can totally just use a regular bowl.
I also bought this lotion from Target, which smells really freaking good by the way, so I could massage their hands after the soak. The container our nail polish is in is actually from the Gourmet Gift Basket care package I got to review last month. Lol I’ve been using it to stash our nail polish in ever since we got it. I think it’s cute. The girls got to peak in and pick the colors they wanted, just like they would at a real salon. (I do have to thank Morgan Taylor Laqueur though for sending us so many wonderful colors. The girls couldn’t choose just one because they loved them all, so they ended up painting each finger a different color. Lol)
Morgan Taylor Lacquer also sent us a cute nail stamping kit, to review, that I used to add a small design to some of the girls’ nails. And I bought the face masks from Target as well.
Like I said before since I had already planned out everything beforehand all I had to do was lay everything out when I got to the hotel.
STEP 4: SET UP THE HAIR STATION
The items pictured above (clip in braids, barrettes, hair chalk and nail stickers) were all in our Sunny Day party pack that we got from House Party Fun, so I didn’t have to buy any of them. All I did was take them out of their plastic packaging and laid them out on the table.
BONUS STEP #5: MAKE THE HOTEL FEEL LIKE A REAL BEAUTY SALON
Now I could have stopped there, but of course, I’m a planning maniac and I can never keep things simple. Lol So I actually took a few extra steps to make our hotel suite feel like a real beauty salon.
Before we even got to the hotel, I sent the girls an “email confirmation” to confirm their beauty appointments at our salon as their party invitation. I grabbed the background from Google and then just added the text and Sunny Day photo in Photoshop. Here’s what that looked like:
Then I set up their “complimentary drink and magazine” station in the kitchen.
I bought some champagne flute glasses from my local 99cent store and then used Canada Dry’s Cranberry Ginger Ale (that I bought from Target, of course, lol) as their complimentary drink. And since we got a few Sunny Day activity books in our Sunny Day party pack from House Party Fun, I used those as their complimentary magazines.
I also bought some chips and cheese doodles so the girls would have something to snack on while they waited for their pizza.
The snack tray, plates, and napkins were also bought at my local 99cent store.
