Yellow Party- Part 5, The Photo Booth

I promise this will be the last post about Creed's yellow party, but there was one detail that I've been dying to show you!

Thanks to some help from my parents, I was able to pull together a last minute idea I had to entertain all the grownups at our family party for Creed.  Our little bungalow has a back hallway where the kitchen, bathroom and our bedrooms meet and the hall is almost a little room so we hung a curtain across the center and made a photo booth.  My mom lent us her camera and remote and my dad set it up with his tripod and professional lights.

Little did I know that while all the adults enjoyed it, the booth was probably Creed's favorite part of the party.  He kept sneaking into it and we ended up with many photos like this.  
I think he snuck into pictures with most of our guests too.  Even when he didn't make it into the picture, he was often peaking in the corner and pushing the remote for everyone.  I know a lot of you don't know my family, but I had to include a ton of pictures because they are guaranteed to make anyone smile.  I really should have cropped a lot of them, but just pretend that I did for now.  Here's Creed with my dad (AKA Papa)
And Creed with my mom.
Creed with his cousin William
I made a bunch of yellow props and left them in there for the guests to enjoy.  I wish that I had time to make more, but I still think they ended up pretty funny.  Here are Whitney and Scott.

My little brother, Eli, and Brenna

And Tyler and Lisa.  They are the masters of the photo booth (they go to the one in our neighborhood regularly) so I couldn't resist posting a bunch of them.  They really were all fabulous!








And at the end of the party, Larry, Creed, and I found a moment together.



I'm not sure which of the next two pictures of Larry scares me more!

Snow anyone?

There have been a few things that we've been meaning to buy, but we just didn't get around to it until Wednesday.  After Creed's birthday party, we made the realization that there was one thing he really really would have loved above all else that we neglected to get.  We could have left it at that, but I had an old gift certificate so we headed to Barnes and Noble and after examining a lot of trains, we came home with this one.

Yellow of course.  He got a few Thomas the Train themed gifts, but he doesn't actually own any of the trains and really wanted one.  He doesn't really watch the show, but boy does he love that yellow train.  He's been sleeping with it during his naps.  It even HAD to go to Ikea with us when we met up with Lisa and Tyler Wednesday night.  We thought we were only picking up a roll of drawing paper, but how could we leave without this?
We spent much of last summer sitting on tacky camping chairs on our porch so at the end of the summer I tried to find some outdoor furniture on clearance, but everything I found was either really ugly or too expensive (and most were both).  Ikea has a lot of great, affordable outdoor furniture this year so it was tough to decide in the few minutes we had before they closed.  

Too bad we woke up to snow the next day!
Don't worry, our new rocking chairs were still put to good use  . . . as a train table. (I thought a train table was unnecessary and we don't really have space or money for one, but Creed hardly plays with that track at all when it is on the ground because he has to crawl and scoot around it and can't reach across it to move his train.  I guess we will have to figure something more permanent out)
It's practically impossible to have the winter blues when you have a new train, and the latest Scaredy Squirrel arrives on your porch (thank you whoever gave Larry that Amazon gift certificate!)
And it's not too cold to go on a walk
and you move your slide inside and dry it off so you can slide and watch Olivia at the same time.

Add on to that about an hour of painting with Creed on our new roll of paper and we had a perfectly cozy day.

Yellow Party- Part 4, Our Fabulous Yellow Guests

I know I mentioned this earlier, but we asked our guests to wear yellow and told them there would be a prize for the person with the most yellow and they did not disappoint!  Tyler and Lisa even arrived with Yellow balloons.

My mom was the cutest!  She even made bracelets covered in yellow buttons and a yellow headband and decorated her sandals with yellow ribbon and flowers.  Oh, and did I mention  that she painted her nails yellow too?  She looked amazing and she even got my dad to put on some yellow garb.  I wish that I would have taken more pictures so you could see all the details.
Here's my little brother Eli and his sweet girlfriend Brenna.
My cousin Whitney and the newest addition to the family, her husband Scott.  
And Larry's brother Scott with his wife Janelle and baby William.  William even wore yellow argyle!
We struggled to get a group photo because I wanted to try after Creed had opened his presents and he wanted to play with his new basketball hoop from Grandma and Grandpa so this was the best that we could do.
And of course Larry was there too, ut he was taking the group picture.
We decided on a tie between the big winners: my mom
And Tyler and Lisa!
This was Tyler and Lisa's prize, their favorite brownies and for my mom we had copies of the pictures of Creed we hung on the wall sans mustache because she doesn't have any of pictures of Creed in her house and that is just a tragedy as far as I'm concerned!

Yellow Party- Part 3, The Food

So cooking is not my strength so the food for this party wasn't extraordinary, but we did do a few fun things.  Creed really wanted a yellow dinner so we had different flavors of yellow Italian soda and flavored water with yellow packaging (should I admit that I didn't even care what the flavors were as long as they were yellow? At least they turned out to be good)

Then we had pineapple and a few different kinds of yellow soup (which I bought): chicken curry, crab and corn bisque, and chicken corn chowder, and cornbread.  And for some reason it was important to me to have jello there.  Creed doesn't even like jello much, but in Ohio Cat always had jello at all the family celebrations (only she made it from scratch with gelatin and fruit juice) and having some sort of jello just seemed like having a little part of her here.  We made jello jigglers and poured them into hollowed out lemons so they looked sort of like real lemon slices.
And for dessert we had tiny pies in jars again.  Creed LOVES pie so I knew he'd rather have pie than cake, and the great thing about these pies is that I could make them days ahead of time and freeze them and just put them in the oven as we were starting dinner (I I could recruit Lisa to help me make them all).

I made little pinwheels with Creed's pictures to put in all the pies.

I hope his wish comes true!

Yellow Party- Part 2, The Decor

So let's be frank here, we did not want to spend a lot of money on a birthday party for our two year old and we were already feeding everyone dinner so the decorations had to be non-existent or CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP!  I still wanted it to create a magical day for Creed and I wanted our guests to feel special.  To me a birthday party is partially about celebrating a birthday, and partially about letting your guests know how important they are to you, that you wanted to share a special occasion and you made some effort to make sure it would be special for them too.

Anyway, I bought  2 yards of yellow polkadot Amy Butler fabric and made a tablecloth (which I justified because it will be nice to have all spring and into the summer).  Then I bought a yard and a half of cheap, yellow acrylic felt.  It comes on the bolt 72" wide so that ended up being way more than I needed, but I wanted to be safe and it was less than $5.00.  I cut it in long strips 3 1/2" wide and then cut each strip into three inch wide flags.  Then I just sewed them into one really long strip on my sewing machine.  Sewing it into one long strip made it much easier to hang.

Since we are renting this house, I wanted to be careful to leave no trace of this celebration behind so I used these little 3M clear hooks with removable adhesive to hang up the flags (I think the ones that I used were actually designed for Christmas lights and they are tiny, but the flags were really light).  If you decide to use them, just be warned that you have to put the hooks up an hour before you hang anything on them.  I draped the flags from wall to wall and cut them to fit as I went.  Then I used a yellow twist-tie to secure them to our light fixture.
The only other thing that I really did for decor was to frame some cute pictures of Creed.  I put yellow scrapbooking paper over the mat and then taped a 5" x 7" on top of that (5" x 7"s are only 39 cents at Costco so this was a cheap project too).  
The photos are kind of blurry in the above picture so here are the closeups (with yellow mustaches of course because babies + mustaches are funny and adorable!)

Candice took these first two (have you seen her blog lately?  She's been up to clever things).

And since I haven't seen Candice in a while we had no recent portraits of Creed so I had to use one that I took myself.
I really loved how the whole thing looked together

But the best part was seeing Creed's face when he woke up in the morning to behold his yellow wonderland.