Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The Big 2: Night Before and Decorations

From the 900 or so pictures of her birthday party I've starred about 87 that are my favorite, so I figure it's going to take a few journal posts to get everything on here that I want to remember about Lilli's 2nd birthday party!

We have had so much ridiculous snow lately. On Thursday afternoon it started snowing around 3, and came in very quickly - by the time I got in to get Lilli at daycare and came back out my footprints were already covered, and when I called Brent to tell him he needed to leave work it hadn't even started snowing there and by the time he got home we already had an inch. After dinner that night he took Lilli out to play in it, I think we ended up with between 1-2 inches that night.Of course the major downside with that one was that overnight a lot of it turned to ice, and it was much a much slicker snow than the previous ones we've had (that one made snow #5 for this winter - two in December and three in January at that time). Lilli's daycare was going to open two hours late (9 am) so I ended up just taking her to work with me so Brent wouldn't be so late to work. It's not far for me, and we were already up and getting ready when we found out about the delay. She had quite the time marking on my papers, visiting, messing with my computer and phone. And she even turned off my computer once. Good times.
"Bad" weather usually means my office will close at 3, so I lucked out by getting out even a little earlier than that and got a batch of strawberry cupcakes made that afternoon. Later that night Lilli (and Brent and Pippin) helped me make the butter cupcakes. I think all the extra help is probably why the strawberry ones tasted better.....
We were up really late most night that week cleaning the house (finishing the upstairs reno as well), and were up until about 12:30 Friday night getting everything decorated. Since her party started at 10 there wasn't a lot of time for last minute stuff on Saturday. I had a tough time at first coming up with a "theme". I looked into a few places to host a party, but they're all so expensive and I knew I wanted to serve lunch which means you're usually pigeon-holed into their prices for overpriced pizza since most places won't just let you bring in what you want. One place even charges $1/juice box which is just robbery. So we decided to do it at our house and focus on great food so I instantly knew I wanted Blue Coast Burrito to cater it. We all LOVE Blue Coast and Lilli can literally eat an entire small burrito on her own. From there I surfed around a few party websites and got some fun ideas to make it into an entire Baja style theme. Not having a lot of free time meant I didn't really get to go nuts with it, but I did find some great decorations that went along with the idea from Party City online, and luckily for me they were all 50% off - probably leftovers from last summer!
We had flowers hanging up and down in the hallway in most of the doorways. And with all the cold weather it really has warmed up the house!
I used Lilli's train table (it comes with a top so it can double as an activity table) and our coffee table as the craft tables. We covered them with plastic tablecloths and then were able to wipe them down for lunch-tables for the Kids.
Pippin wasn't impressed by the little games from Oriental Trading. I wasn't either.
One craft was a little flip flop frame and we printed out pictures of each child off of Facebook so they could actually make the frame. The other craft was a little monkey with sunglasses.
Brent came up with the cute idea to put the party horns in some of the bright colored pitchers I already had, and then I grabbed some tissue paper to stuff it with and make it look a little more decorated.
On Saturday morning I used the window markers we have to decorate the front door with #2s. Lilli LOVES to write on the front door and was so mad I wouldn't let her "help:. But the sun was also in her eyes and she was overreacting a little. Ha!
Our house! All decorated for the party and ready for our guests!

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