Yahoo Lifestyle 
Mum's $3 Kmart buy for daughter's 'lockdown' 21st party
A mum from Victoria has made sure that her daughter’s 21st birthday party was a bash to remember, despite the state’s strict stage 4 restrictions throwing their original plans out the window.
Michelle tells Yahoo Lifestyle that she turned to good old Kmart for many of the gorgeous decorations she used to transform the family dining room into a ‘Winter Wonderland’.
Above the dining table, she hung a $3 paper chandelier in different shades of pink while bunches of white faux flowers in fishbowl vases ($5 and $10 respectively) dotted the table itself. And a milestone birthday such as this isn’t complete without a light-up number ‘21’ which Michelle put together using two of Kmart’s $5 number party lights.
After finding that some items such as the rose gold ‘Happy Birthday’ balloons were out of stock at her local store, Michelle turned to other retailers like eBay.
Her daughter was floored by her mum’s styling efforts and even suspected she’d had a helping hand from a professional.
“She couldn’t believe it when she walked into the room and saw the decorations,” Michelle says.
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“She said it looked incredible and that she thought that a professional had come in overnight and decorated,” she adds.
Of course, due to the current lockdown, the family of four were unable to have any party guests over to celebrate - let alone a professional decorator.
Michelle and her husband had a solution for that as well, and the touching gesture left everyone, including the birthday girl, very emotional.
“Because she couldn’t see any friends on her birthday, I had secretly organised more than 20 family and friends to send video messages. My husband compiled them all, along with hundreds of photos and set them to six of her favourite songs, lasting over 35 minutes. Many happy tears were shed!” she reports.
Michelle says that even though the ‘do wasn’t quite what her daughter had hoped for before the COVID-19 crisis hit, she still ‘absolutely loved it’.
“Look out 2021 because there’s going to be a lot of delayed celebrating going down!” she adds.
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