TODAY'S TMJ4

Birthday Parties Fit for a Diva

By Dan O'Donnell

WAUKESHA - "Happy birthday, Jordan!!!" a chorus of six year-old girls yell as they jostle to pose in front of a full-length mirror.

"Oh my goooooosh!" one cries as she hears her favorite Hannah Montana song come on the stereo. "I like totally love this song!"

"Look at me!" shouts another as she waves a manicured hand to two of her friends, who immediately grab their feather boas and follow the leader in a runway swagger worthy of Milan...or at least the third grade.

At the Serenity Day Spa (2120 E. Moreland Blvd.) in Waukesha, Jordan Grobb's seventh birthday isn't so much a party as it is a fashion show, where elementary school ingenues aren't just jubilant, they're downright glamorous.

Serenity is one of the first spas in Wisconsin to offer what owner Patty Hanish calls "spa diva parties"--full-service pampering complete with birthday cake and presents.

"We've been doing these parties since April," Hanish says. "After doing a little searching on the web, I realized that moms were trying to do these types of parties at home. So I thought, I have a room available and I could do it for them so they could come and just enjoy themselves and not have all the work and the mess at their house."

After this realization, Patty opened up a party room in her building, broke open gallons of pink and purple paint, and turned an empty storage room into a brightly colored, fully mirrored, Jonas-postered paradise of pre-teen pedicures.

"Why should grown-ups have all the fun at spas?" she asks.

In a typical two hour party, birthday girls from 4 to 14 and their guests become dazzling divas with manicures, pedicures, sparkle makeup, and hair glitz.

"When the girls arrive, they each receive spa robes, pink headbands, and flip flops," Hanish explains. "They begin with pedicures, and then we have craft time, where the girls decorate a picture frame that they get to take home after we take a group photo."

"Then they get their manicures, hair and makeup, and will do a little runway walk with their pink boas. We introduce each girl just like a fashion show, and the last one introduced is, of course, our birthday diva."

The diva of the day also gets (naturally) a tiara and a sparkling juice toast in her honor, while her guests enjoy gift bags, tween magazines, and dancing to the latest Disney Channel hits.

"I think it's incredibly awesome," Jordan's mother Kelle Grobb says as she takes a look at a line of beaming little divas giggling to each other and reading issues of Tiger Beat as they receive pedicures. "They thought of every single little detail right down to the cards they put on the lotions in the gift baskets saying what day it was and whose party."

"They're getting their nails done, they're getting their toes done, they're having a great time!"

And after the manicures have dried, after the candles have been blown out and the presents opened, what could be greater than hearing this from the birthday girl?

"Thank you so much, Mom," Jordan gushes. "You're the best mom ever!"

Okay, so maybe she's not totally a diva just yet.

Click Here to book a Spa Diva party for your little diva!

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