Happy Mothers Garden Party

Today was the CHA Mothers Garden Party - an event organized by the PTO at my daughter's school to celebrate mothers in the run up to Mother's day (next Sunday in the US).
It was a great event, fun for the kids and the adults and well attended by moms, grandmothers, aunts, nieces, daughters, sons and lady friends!
There was great catering, face painting, fun activities, a photobooth, vendors selling all sorts of goodies and excellent music.
Today was a chance to spend some important time with my daughter and her school friends and their female relatives.
For me it was also the end of a lot of work. For weeks, the luncheon committee and I have been working on this event - for me it was particularly the decorations. Decorating for a beautiful garden themed event is a challenge in itself. This event had two additional challenges.
The first was that all of the decorations had to be made out of recycled or reusable materials to match the school year theme of being green.
The second was to not spend any money - this aspect was actually helped a lot by the first factor!

So we have spent weeks collecting paper notices from the school office after they had been used, paper coverings from the art tables, sticks from the school grounds and our yards and then there were the donated items including decorative sticks, recycled felt,tissue paper from birthday wrappings, bamboo cut offs, bed sheets and tablecloths. All repurposed and made as reusable as possible for decorations of bunting, giant flowers, hundreds of paper flowers, a decorative log and so on!

I have been so inspired and am so grateful to everyone who helped with the event especially to all those who gave time and creative skills in making the flowers and decorations. My daughter wowed me by making hundreds of flowers, flower pictures, and cutting out petals - she is 4. She worked hard along with me to make our contributions.

I feel grateful to my daughter for being so strong and supportive. I feel grateful to my family and friends who kept cheering me on even when many miles away! I feel so grateful to my husband and to the other husbands / daddies who came on the day to help hang all our beautiful decorations up. I feel grateful for all the other moms who helped craft - you know who you are!! I feel very grateful for all of the CHA community. We are very lucky to have such an awesome school for our daughter and I strongly recommend this amazing place for anyone with kids from 2 1/2 to 8th grade within the San Fernando valley or area - Chatsworth Hills Academy is an excellent school and a very supportive and fun community.