Marisol Nichols' Blog: Party Planning and Preparing!

We hope you’ve enjoyed Marisol Nichols‘ blogs this past month!

She’s back in Los Angeles after a spring and summer based in Shreveport, Louisiana as she filmed her latest project, ABC’s The Gates.

Although filming has wrapped, the actress is still working hard — preparing a party for daughter Rain India, who turns 2 today!

In her final blog, Nichols discusses choosing a fairy theme for the birthday bash — and how things have taken off since working with a party planning pal.

Hi mamas! My beautiful daughter Rain turns 2 today — I can’t believe it. Time really does fly!

As all you moms know, the second you have a kid it’s all about them. As soon as I became a mom, my birthday stopped having any meaning whatsoever. Now it’s all about her, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

My family is flying into town to help us celebrate so I really want to make this a special day for her and super fun. Being preschool-age she has lots of friends so we’re going for a big celebration.

I was just going to have a ‘party’ (cake, balloons and some streamers) until my friends were asking what the theme was. Who knew birthday parties had themes?! Themes, really? Okay, themes — here we go! Sesame Street? Fairies? Princesses? Elmo? How do you pick? Fortunately, Rain has this fairy mural above her bed which she loves, so voilà, fairy theme, here we come!

I feel like I’ve taken Rain to enough kids’ birthday parties to recognize what the kids enjoy most at each of them. So I decided to do my own version, gathering all the greatest things about all the parties and bringing them together.

Incredibly lucky for me, one of my dearest friends, Melinda, who has a little boy slightly older than Rain, also conveniently happens to be a party planner. I confess, I kinda called her immediately for some advice. When I told her my idea, she opened the floodgates. I guess in her mind the idea of putting a bunch of balloons out was not gonna fly. So she’s taken over and now we’re working on it together. Yay! Two heads are so much better than one, especially when one happens to do party planning for a living.

So I’ve embraced the theme. The colors are going to be pink, green and yellow, like Tinker Bell, her favorite fairy.

She had the idea to decorate the house as if you were entering a fairy palace. So we’re hanging tulle (the stuff tutus are made out of) and using pink and green fabric for a tablecloth.

Then, I went to a local craft store and found fairy wings, little wands, ribbons, sparkles, glitter, tiaras (all conveniently on sale in time for Halloween – thank you).

I got Rain a Fisher-Price Little People Dance ‘n Twirl Palace, which totally goes with the theme. We’ll open it at the party and everyone can play with it.

I’m still tackling the food but we know for sure we’re going to do fun, kid-friendly fruits and veggies. And the cake! It’s white cake with raspberry filling. I also insisted on a sugar-free option because Rain doesn’t usually eat sugar and I wanted to give moms that option.

Oh! And the part I’m most excited about! Melinda came up with a great idea as a keepsake for Rain. What we’re going to do is take a large canvas so that we can trace each of the kid’s hands with non-toxic markers, write their names and paste their photos next to each. It will be an activity for the kids to do and when it’s all done Rain will have it in a really sweet picture frame to hang in her room. How cute is that?!

I’ll send in some photos after the party for PEOPLE Moms & Babies to post, so that you can all see the final result!

This will be my last blog. Thanks for sharing my first-ever blogging journey with me — it has been an exciting ride! I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. Thanks for reading! Feel free to follow me on Twitter and keep up with me on Facebook.

To all you wonderful moms out there, I love you so much! Moms rock!

–- Marisol Nichols