Leilani's 5th Birthday

After the baby shower, we only had 2 weeks to prep for Leilani's birthday. She wanted a Cinderella Theme, then changed her mind last minute to Sleeping Beauty when she fell in love with the costume. This time around, we got smarter with the party planning and decided to outline it all first (Ben's idea of course). We used Pingg again for the invitations and uploaded a design we made using Word and SnagIt and printed a few at Walmart just to have some she could hand out to friends at school. On the day of, we had a trampoline out back, but the rain deterred most of the kids from using it until nightfall when the rain subsided, so most of the entertainment came from the scheduled games, food, and pinata. Here is what we wound up with.


THE MENU
This was originally thought of to resemble a 5 course meal (think royalty) and so we had fruit kabobs as appetizers. These were placed in centerpieces my mom made carving Sleeping Beauty that we found on this website. Then the main dishes were Barbacoa, Mole, Salad, and some Desserts, served outside buffet style.  The desserts were cupcakes and a cake. Leilani had fallen in love with the Barbie cakes, so we got an idea off the web and then my aunt just ran with it and created a fondant masterpiece. She also decorated all the individual cupcakes with blue frosting and little toothpicks with Sleeping Beauty’s picture on them as a sticker. We got a lot of good shots of the kids with blue faces from these.


THE TREATS & LOOT
We really scored on candy, mainly because I made sure to go on the day immediately following Halloween (Leilani’s birthday is Nov 10th so I’m lucky) and get everything that was on clearance. We filled the mason jars with candy and put tickets on them indicating how many tickets each was worth. We also got some clearance popcorn buckets with all the princesses on them, and since we owned a cotton candy machine and a coffee machine that plugs in to keep warm, we had a great concession stand with Cotton Candy, Popcorn, Hot Chocolate (with Marshmallows), and Candy. For the Goodie Bags, we just took a picture of Leilani, cropped out the background (you can do that with Word 2010 now), and posted it onto a pretty sunshine background to make an icon then printed it out on the 2" by 2" labels you can buy at your local office supply store. Then we made a template on word and printed our template on cardstock and cut out to size. We took sandwich size clear bags and filled them with candy, then just stapled the cardstock to the goodie bags. For the Pinata, we found a deal on a large Sleeping Beauty one for $15. The cool thing about these big ones is that they use a lot of carboard, and it compartmentalizes the inside of the piñata, giving you 1 piñata in the each leg, 1 in the torso, and 1 in the head for a total of 4 piñata's in one. So in short, we filled all of it and it took about an hour to get it all out which the big kids seemed to really love. Some of the smaller kids (Leilani included), were way too busy on the trampoline, working off their sugar rush to care about getting any more candy, they were satisfied with the loot they got at the concession stand (one kid had over 100 tickets he had won). 


THE GAMES

1. Slay the Dragon: A dragon dartboard, using the soft plastic golf balls wrapped in strips of Velcro, cardboard for the dragon, and an old backing of a couch for the target. 
2. Feed the Animals: Bean bag toss to feed the forest animals, depending on the size of the whole was the quantity of the tickets. 
3. Pin the Kiss: We wound up not using this one, we made it out of paper using Rasterbator to magnify the picture, then painted it and pinned it on some cardboard. We were going to have the kids pin a felt “kiss” onto her mouth and depending on the square, it would indicate the amount of tickets, but we ran out of room in the yard and just wound up using it as decoration in the living room. 
4. Fairy Knockdown: This was to emulate the 3 Fairies, since there were 3 tries. We just used the tins from some canned fruit and tennis balls. The number of cans knocked down will determine the size or value of the prize. 
5. Ring of Fire: This started out as “get the ring on sleeping beauty” but the paper mache didn’t turn out quite as expected, so we just painted it black, cut out some nails and used it as the Dragon’s Hand. Depending on if the toss makes it around the finger, they get tickets, the more they get on the same finger, the more tickets it is worth.
6. Blackbird bowling: Using Leilani’s existing bowling set, we create sock puppets to cover the bowling pins, all black like the Blackbird. It just took a package of children’s black socks, some tacky glue, some googly eyes, and some foam sheets. 

So all in all, the kids seemed to have a really good time, and they went away with some great loot. One of my nephew's exclaimed, "I can't wait for Leilani's Birthday next year!" to his parents, which was really great to hear. For the full gallery, click here.

Mikayla's BaBy-Q Baby Shower

We decided on having a BBQ for our baby shower, mainly because it was the more casual approach we were going for and our families were just meeting each other.  We did, however, go all out on the decorations and little touches here and there.  So I've highlighted them below.  For a full picture of the baby shower in action, you can check out the gallery.

The theme was from something I saw on whimsy and wise, but catered to be a little less extravagant.  I didn't want to spend extra money on invitations or the guestbook, so I got a few ideas off of Etsy and we made them ourselves.  We wound up using a free evite service called Pingg that lets you upload your own templates, which is the only evite site I found that lets you do that, the others consider that an upgrade service and charge you a membership fee for it.  It even lets you manager your RSVP list, showcase your registry, send automatic reminders and thank you emails, all for free.  I love this site.

Back to the shower though, we had tons of help.  My fiance's sister made, bought, or brought a few of the things, my aunt made a cake and lent us some flag streamers to use, my cousin made cake pops, my mom made a fruit display, salad display, and all of the food, my dad strung up lights and ran wire to get electricity out to the gazebo's.. and we even made a collage of our childhood stories that we gathered from friends and family and made some of the decorations. 


We had games planned, like a diaper raffle and a few others, but we never got around to playing them. All in all, we had a great time and it was a very casual baby shower.

Davy Doing the Carlton

We had Mason Jar Centerpieces with Mikayla's inital on each of them.

There were 18 tissue Pom Poms in all, click here for the how-to

There was a 12" by 12" Welcome Baby Mikayla sign, that hung up in the house as people came in and signed in.  We had decided not to let any one know the baby's name until the baby shower, so this was the great unveiling.

There were souvenir burlap bags with 9 peanuts in each, that my mom hand-made

Tealight candle holders for the tables, using empty baby food jars that my cousin collected for us.  We just soaked them to remove the glue, and sterilized them in the dishwasher before using.

My mom made peanut babies for the Name Tags, decorated using ribbon and baby bottles from the 99 cents store, which she hand painted faces on and swaddled them in fabric.

We made souvenirs using more baby food jars, and printed the tags on colored card stock which we cut out to size and then just hole-punched and tied onto the neck of the baby bottle.

We spray painted the Baby Q sign and placed it in the front yard so that people would have no problem spotting the house.  We even placed another sign by the front door so people would let themselves in as they arrived, letting them know to come on in.

We bought the Baby Shower buttons at Walmart, and here is Leilani with her Big Sister button

My fiance's sister brought and wrote out the blackboards for the Main Menu, Dessert, Sign in, and Side dish tables.

My mom made a Salad with Bell Pepper flowers and Jicama Storks.

Here is a shot of the flag Streamers, the tissue pom poms, and picnic setup in the backyard.

Here is the baby carriage fruit display, my mom got inspired after watching this how-to video.

We were inspired by the guestbook designs on Etsy and Ben drew this one out and colored it in,  We had the guests fingerprint the leaves on the tree and sign their name on it, then framed it to go next to our family picture in the nursery.

We wanted the kids to have their own space, while parents could still keep an eye on them. So since everything was being done in the yard, we decorated the covered patio with the KidZone & BabyZone areas.  The Kid Zone had tons of Leilani's toys (piano, karaoke machine, black & decker workbench, kitchen, etc) and had all the kids playing on it.  Behind the Kid Zone, in Baby Zone, was a rug with a futon on it for crawling & lounging, and had 2 baby playpens, a bouncer, a rocker, and a swing.

We had a BBQ Buffet style set up with the menu boards indicating what was what. It included the baby carriage fruit display, baby back ribs, tri-tip, bbq chicken, carne asada, bbq corn, garden salad with jicama storks, potato salad, drinks, and desserts. 

Each table top had a centerpiece, some tealight candles, and the souvenirs

We made a template on Word for us to have index cards with people's contact info for us to build our address book, and printed them out on cardstock paper. 

My cousin made cake pops for the baby shower and brought them in her baby carriage basket that rocked and played music the whole time.   The other desserts were a chocoflan made by my mom, and a chocolate cake with pineapple and coconut filling in the shape of a bassinet by my aunt.

The nametags were cut out of cardstock and hot-glued together, to be pinned onto people's clothes with a tiny clothespin.  A star was placed on the back for one of the games.

The bags were made out of burlap paper and had cardboard reinforcing the inside so we could use them as utensil holders.