January 6, 2012 by whileeveryoneelseissleeping

Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part III- The Final Chapter

Juliette’s big day arrived. I don’t know who was more excited, me or her. That’s not true, actually. It was definitely me. She seemed completely oblivious to her role as guest of honor or to Mommy’s frenzy of preparations. But I was pumped!

We managed to squeeze in a short nap and then picked up the cake. Michelle of Raspberry N Creme Cakes made me a fabulous cupcake display with an even more fabulous 6″ round cake on top featuring a little girl reading a book made completely out of sugar. This girl is truly talented!

I adorned each cupcake with handmade mini books cupcake toppers featuring some of Juliette’s favorite reads.

My friend, Carly, who is way craftier than I am, made this cool sign to welcome everyone to the party.

As guests arrived, they munched on a spread of book-themed eats. The menu included:

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary Garden Salad

Very Hungry Caterpillar Fruit Salad

Peanut Butter & Jelly Forever Sandwiches

Strega Nona’s Magic Pasta Pot (Baked Ziti)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Art’s Famous Meatballs)

I quickly learned that I am a complete amateur at this kid party thing. Lessons learned: 1) Crunchy peanut butter is not ideal for small kids and will cause parents to have to pick the crunchy bits out, 2) While embellishing the party hats with each kiddos initial was extremely cute, there were tears shed over getting an undesirable color hat. Who would have thought?, and most importantly, 3) Take cupcake topper with toothpick out of cupcake before handing to unsupervised kid. There were no injuries, thank God, but that was a little dumb on my part 😛

The party flew by. It was a kind of metaphor for how quickly this year went. Suddenly, my husband Dean and I are the parents of a toddler. Yikes! We celebrated in style with our book themed attire. Dean in his Dr. Seuss Thing 1, Thing 2 t-shirt from Kohls and me in my Alice and Wonderland t-shirt from Old Navy. Juliette wore a Carter’s birthday dress and later changed into her Green Eggs And Ham onesie.

Juliette thoroughly enjoyed her birthday cupcake, and even stole some of Mommy’s when I had my head turned.

One by one, all the guests went home and it was time for the clean up to begin. I left the decor up on the mantle until I decorated for Christmas as a reminder of all the fun I had putting the party together. Until next year. Will I go as crazy for birthday #2? You never know. Stranger things have happened.

Book Cupcake Toppers Template available on my Scribd account

Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part II (whileeveryoneelseissleeping.wordpress.com)
Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part I (whileeveryoneelseissleeping.wordpress.com)

December 27, 2011 by whileeveryoneelseissleeping

Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part II

In my last post (which was ages ago thanks to all the pre-Christmas craziness), I discussed how I came up with a great book theme for Juliette’s first birthday party. Of course, a theme is only as good as it’s execution. Luckily for Juliette, I take my party planning pretty seriously.

First, I did quite a bit of web browsing to see what other crafty people out there did with a children’s book theme. For years, I would cut and paste these links into an email to myself and keep replying to the same gmail thread to keep all the ideas in one place. This worked, of course, but was a little labor intensive and required opening a lot of windows to look at the various links. Fortunately, one of the pages I came across in my google search was Pinterest. It was the perfect solution for creating a story board for Juliette’s party. You can find my original idea bulletin board here.

Next, I set to work on my decorations and party favors- in primary colors to echo the colors in the invitation. I was feeling very much like Martha Stewart and lo and behold, Martha had an excellent idea for book garland on her website. I must have been feeling a little hippy when I set down to make my garland because I couldn’t bear to let all that work go to waste on paper books I was going to toss later, so I made my garland functional by making large books (one 8×11 page folded in half) of sign language flashcards using images from babysignlanguage.com and smaller books (one 8×11 page folded x 8) using these free printable Itsy Bitsy book templates. Juliette is still carrying her little books around!

For party favors, I decided to give each child in attendance a book with a handmade bookmark. I purchased coloring activity books for the older kids, soft books for the babies and found 4 packs of mini Dr. Seuss books for $8 at Costco. I made a bookmark template on Word, printed on card stock, cut them out with my handy, dandy paper cutter, used a decorative punch to jazz them up and embellished each with the child’s initial.

No kid party is complete without a goodie bag, so I purchased clear plastic bags at the party store along with Curious George and Winnie the Pooh blow outs and filled them with goldfish, fruit chews and chocolate.

I bought inexpensive paper party hats and added colorful pompoms, alphabet ribbon and each child’s initial. This turned out to be a little more work than I originally thought so I enforced a mandatory wearing of party hats!

Since the kids in attendance varied in age from 3 mo to 7 years, I wanted to come up with various activities to keep them all entertained. I ended up purchasing washable crayons and markers, book character stickers and photocopying coloring page templates with various book characters including: Dr. Seuss, Alice In Wonderland, Thomas the Train, Curious George and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

For the adults, I modified a version of the Alternative Names for Popular Children’s Books Game. I found this game on multiple sites, but recommend reading about A Bookish Baby Shower on PinkTea-cj-blogspot.com or OhdeedOh.com for a link to a free printable version via Scribd.

Michelle of the blog So Wonderful, So Marvelous threw a Dr. Seuss-inspired party for her son’s 2nd birthday and used Dr. Seuss’s Happy Birthday to You book as a guest book. I love guest books and had one for Juliette’s baptism, so I was ecstatic to borrow this idea, modifying her Dr. Seuss rhyme slightly.

Thanks for joining me on my special day.

Just one more request before you go on your way.

This is the most important thing- truth be told.

A message I’ll treasure ’till I grow old.

Write a little or write a lot,

On the front, the back or any open spot.

***

With all the preparations in place, I couldn’t wait until Juliette’s special day. You’ll have to wait until Once Upon A Birthday Party- Party III to see how it turned out!

Free Printables Available at my Scribd Account:

Sources of Inspiration

Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part I (whileeveryoneelseissleeping.wordpress.com)
Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part III- The Final Chapter (whileeveryoneelseissleeping.wordpress.com)

December 9, 2011 by whileeveryoneelseissleeping

Once Upon A Birthday Party- Part I

Since Juliette’s bday party was the catalyst for the creation of this blog, it is the topic of my first real post.

First birthday parties are no laughing matter in the world of Moms. It is a tremendous accomplishment to birth and keep a child alive for an entire year. This accomplishment calls for a major celebration. Apparently, this celebration MUST have a theme. I thought this a little silly at first. After all, what is my Juliette truly into aside from putting everything she sees in her mouth. But it was only silly until I came up with my wonderfully marvelous theme- a book party.

You see, my Juliette spends most of her play time knocking her books off her rocking chair onto the floor and then putting them back on the chair. She can do this all day and usually does.

Now that I had a suitable theme, I needed to create an invitation. I decided to create a story based on our favorite books: On the Night You Were Born by Nancy Tillman, I Love You Through and Through by Bernadette Rosetti-Shustak, Love You Forever by Robert Munsch and Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. My biggest challenge was that I was working on my husband’s dilapidated Mac and its version of Word did not feature book fold. But that was solved easily enough. I made each page of the book one page in Word, downloaded an app to convert it into a PDF booklet and voila, I had a great looking invitation.