Second Birthday Party

I was having difficulty coming up with what we would do as a theme for Leah's second birthday party. It was about a month before her birthday and our next door neighbor had given us this mega blocks table. I was making breakfast the next morning before we had even gotten a chance to play with it when I witnessed this from the kitchen. Leah had been picking up blocks one by one and sorting them out by color into their matching places. (I was beaming!) She picked up the purple piece and hesitated for a while. Finally, she threw the block down and went over and grabbed a book instead. Where does the purple one go?

It was at this moment that I decided that we needed to do a colors themed party. My daughter has somehow inherited my love of color coding. It was perfect! She was also into coloring, so I figured we would do a rainbow/coloring themed birthday party. It wasn't exactly original, but it seemed easy and doable. Pinterest to the rescue! Here's my board of yummy appetizer ideas, birthday invite layouts, activities, party favors, and of course THE CAKE!

I was mostly excited about the cake... I mean... look at that thing. It's amazing! The two invitation seemed easy enough. I googled how to make an easy chevron print background in Photoshop and the rest was just deciding on a color scheme and fun fonts. I even came up with an original little rhyme that wasn't on Pinterest.. all of that reading of Dr. Seuss is finally paying off!

As you may recall, last year I went a little overboard for the party favors. This year, I was trying to tone it down. I wanted to make something useful that the kids would possibly use in the future. Pinterest came in handy once again and I decided to make a crayon wallet. I was able to get all the materials I needed for under $10 - two yards of fabric, some elastic, and a box of assorted crayons. It's really easy to embroider things with my mom's machine, so I went ahead and did that too. The hardest part was finding two coordinating fabrics that I liked.

We had lots of yummy food - all recipes from Pinterest. The pizza puffs went quickly, the meatballs were a cinch, and the bacon-wrapped little sausages were so tasty. On top of these little appetizers we had a ton of colorful fruit. I think everyone left with their bellies full.

We started at 11 am and I just had a bunch of toys set up to play with inside. It warmed up a bit, so we decided to head out in front of the house and do sidewalk chalk, bubbles, and play with ride on toys. Around noon, we headed back in to eat. After the kids were finished eating, they wanted to go outside and play again, so we headed back out for present opening and play... and an attempt at getting a group picture.

Playing inside while moms catch up and we wait for the weather to warm up a little.

This little blocked road in front of my house is perfect for sidewalk chalk and outside play. 

The birthday girl with her birthday presents!

Group picture?

This year she actually opened them and said, "Oooh! Wow!" :-)

After opening presents we went inside to sing Happy Birthday and eat CAKE!!! This was the moment I was looking forward to... cutting the cake... Oh and watching Leah blow out the candles OF COURSE. ;) I had stayed up all night long working on the cake. The layered colors part was a cinch. The only problem I ran into was while I was icing it. I ran out of icing midway through and so I ended up having to make another batch. I put the icing in the sleeve and started tying to decorate the cake again, but the consistency was too thick and I could barely get it out of the tip, so I put it back in the mixer and added some milk and loaded the icing back into the sleeve AGAIN. I started decorating the cake again... but then the frosting was too runny. Eek! (This was around 2 am.) The third time was luckily the charm and I was able to finish icing the cake. I then decided to throw some sprinkles on the cake. Evenly distributing them and getting them to stick was interesting. I ended up with sprinkles all over my kitchen because I was literally having to launch them at the cake. :)

Cake Process Pictures! It was very easy to do! I followed this tutorial.

These are the after pictures of my kitchen. :)

Leah has been practicing blowing out candles with scented candles around the house, so she was ready when cake time came.

The cake was too tall and she couldn't blow out the candles.

Luckily a friend of mine stepped in to help so I could take pictures. :)

The colorful inside... and oh it was SOO tasty. It's making me really hungry just looking at these pictures!

Leah took a nice long nap after everyone went home.  When she woke up, she wanted cake, so I went ahead and did a cake smash photo shoot with her. She enjoyed it.

"How about you get me some more of the cake over there?"

"All Done!!"

A comparison picture of last year versus this year. My little girl LOVES her cake!

Happy 2nd Birthday my dear sweet Leah!