Farm Birthday Party

Phew!  July was a blur.  Birthdays, weddings, life in general.......it was busy, busy.  Earlier in the month my son celebrated his second birthday {sniff, sniff - he's growing up so fast}.  The party was a farm theme complete with pony rides & a small petting zoo.  The kids LOVED all the animals - the baby pigs were a huge hit!  I loved getting crafty and seeing all my hard work come together just as I had envisioned it - seeing all the happy, smiling kids (especially how happy my son was) was a great bonus!  Here are some pictures of my little man's big day:

I love balloon wreaths! I made one for his first birthday and it turned
out so adorable, I knew I'd be making more.  All you need is a straw wreath form
(still wrapped in plastic), a few large packs of the balloons of your choice
and floral pins. Just stick the balloons to the wreath with your pins and TA-DA!



The gift bags I found online at Oriental Trading.
I stuffed them with farm themed books, puzzles, stickers, pencils, erasers
and activity pads.  All items were purchased at the dollar section of Target, the Dollar Store
or Oriental Trading.

I wrote how old he was in each picture on the clothes pin.
The pictures were of him every other month since his
first birthday (12 mo, 14 mo, 16mo, etc..)

In addition to the cupcake tower, we had Twizzlers, Cow Tales, Skittles,
Kit Kats, Cow Pies & Haystacks

It's not pictured here but my husband was up until 1am smoking
a delicious pork butt for our BBQ feast - it was SOOOOO good!
The rest of the menu included watermelon, macaroni salad,
chips, popcorn chicken & pigs in a blanket.

I found these beautiful sunflowers the day before the party
at my local grocery store on manager's special for a fraction
of their original price - score!!

You can't really tell from this picuture, but the utensils were wrapped in paper
bandana print napkins and I tied a piece of jute twine around the
bundle to secure it all in place.

Our adorable next door neighbor, Lizzie, with an adorable
miniture cow!

The birthday boy!!

I wanted to keep these pigs!

All of the signs pictured (wreath sign, banners, thank you sign, food sign, etc.), I created with my Silhouette.  I can't tell you how much easier that made my life.  If you don't have one, you really need to ask Santa for one this Christmas (btw, I do not get paid any money whatsoever from Silhouette.....I just love their machine to the moon and think every crafter should have one)!

In addition to the animals & food, we did play a few games.  Pin the Tail on the Piggy, a Cow Pie toss (brown bean bags I made from felt), and an egg hunt.  The plastic eggs were borrowed from neighbors and inside each one I put a yellow pom-pom to represent the yolk.  However, one contained birthday confetti and whomever got that one was the winner.  This allowed it to be fair and fun even for the littlest of participants.  Game prizes included egg shaped sidewalk chalk that I got on clearance after Easter, a punch balloon that was in the shape of a bull when blown up and a wooden farm set that you could paint.

I'm not gonna lie, it was a lot of hard work. But I started my planning EARLY and was always on the lookout for things that I could get on sale or super cheap that went with my theme.  By starting early I was able to work on it piece by piece, a little at a time which helped me not to get overwhelmed.

I had a blast planning and creating this party for him and his friends and in turn, they all had a wonderful time.  Win, Win!! 

Now, what to do for next year........ {wink, wink}

Birthday Bucket

My son will be turning 2 next week (WHAAA?!?!?!?  When did that happen?). I've been busy, busy trying to get everything ready for the big day (I'll post pics of the party here so you can see what all that I've done!), which is one of the reasons I've been MIA here lately.

One thing that we do to get ready for the celebration is to bring out the birthday bucket. 

I purchase seven small, inexpensive gifts, wrap them and put them into the birthday bucket. Starting one week before his birthday, he gets to choose one gift from the bucket to open. He gets to open one gift per day leading up to this birthday, thus creating a little birthday countdown.

Last year I just purchased a bucket from the Dollar Tree and called it a day. This year I decided to jazz it up a bit. I downloaded the balloon banner from the Silhouette store and used Brady Bunch Remastered font to create my design. I cut it out on white vinyl and applied it to my bucket. 

A couple of curly ribbons and big polka-dot bows later, I've got this:

Pretty darlin' if I do say so myself!

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

March 2nd is Dr. Seuss' birthday and at the last minute I thought it would be fun to celebrate it with my son. Being that this was a last minute decision and my son is all of 19mo, there isn't much of a wow factor here but I thought I would share anyway!






 Beautiful red and white carnations that I found at the grocery store for $4......woo hoo!!





 My son's lunch.....Green Eggs and Ham (& cheese sandwich) with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Goldfish crackers.





 The Dr. Seuss books we read at naptime and bedtime.





The Thing 1 and Thing 2 cupcakes we made using red velvet cake mix, white frosting and blue cotton candy.

The cupcake wrappers were made using my Silhouette and Dr Soos font downloaded from dafont.com

My little Thing 1 helping me make the cupcakes!

I found a red long sleeve tee at Walmart for $2 (score!) and I already had T-Shirt transfers on hand, so I quickly made him a Thing 1 shirt.  The transfers I had were for light t-shirts and would have turned out better if I had the dark t-shirt transfers that leave a white backround, but again I was doing this last minute and trying not to spend too much money!  It served its purpose and the little man didn't seem to mind one bit!

Maybe next year I'll be more prepared (maybe.....)!