Creed's Bee Birthday Party

For months, Creed's been telling people he was having a bee birthday party.  He loves the Bee Movie (the only kids DVD at my parents house so it has been watch too many times).  He regularly pretends to be a bee so I guess a bee party was a given.  I had some great ideas for other parties and tried to convince him, but he was certain about what he wanted.  I was not so certain of what we would do for a bee party so I kept suggesting other things.  Finally he said, "I know, I really want a Hello Kitty party!" Umm, so, bee birthday party it was, and he was SUPER excited (I would have been ok with a Hello Kitty party if he actually liked Hello Kitty, but before he said her name, I didn't even know he knew who Hello Kitty was).  

I let him choose five friends to invite and we made them bee shirts for the festivities.

 I got the idea for bee shirts here and then adjusted it a little and added wings to the back.

We just put up some honeycomb bees around the house and the decorations were done.

Creed barely slept the night before because he was so excited (picture him waking me up at 3 am to ask if it was time for his party yet) so he was crabby when everyone arrived and there were lots of tears (please tell me that your children do this too)

 We started off the party dancing to "Flight of the Bumblebees" which gave me a case of the giggles and a bunch of blurry photos.  Then we colored bees.

 and we hung them up for all to admire.

 I was hoping for warm weather so we could have a pollen hunt like this one, but it was snowing outside so while the kids colored we hid "pollen" around the house for them to collect (yellow pompoms, werthers, rolos, small cadbury eggs, etc.) I think it was their favorite part of the party.  They were hard-working bees.

Then we ended with lunch.  The napkins, paper bags, plates, straws, and candles were from Sweet Lulu.  Have you checked out their shop?  It's full of the sweetest party supplies.  I wanted to buy two of everything and stock all my cupboards.

We had to have lots of honeycomb shaped oyster crackers on hand.

I just used a beehive cookie cutter to cut out the peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and I stuck little sugar bees on top.

 And I used bee cookie cutter to cut out watermelon to top the fruit kabobs.

 And of course bees only drink from flowers

 I had grand ideas for a bee cake, but Creed loves the chocolate donuts a Costco and we figured this was a good time to give into his begging.  I just stacked them into a beehive and stuck some candles on top.

 And afterwards we had a surplus of donuts to deliver to friends.

 We sent each of the bees home with bee notebooks and pens (thank you dollar section and Michael's)

 And Bee balloons with bubbles + bags bursting with "pollen".  What more could four-year-olds want?

 The smile on this guys' face at the end of the party was totally worth it. Think there's any chance something as sweet as a bee party will please him as much in ten years?  Can't we just freeze time?

Let the celebration begin!

Did I mention that this little guy turned one last week? I'm going through the typical parental shock of how quickly he's growing up.

 We decided to have a small family party, and I didn't really have a theme in mind, I just tried to think of things that Ollie might like and it ended up working out pretty well.  He loved all the doilies that we had hanging up for Valentine's Day.  He spent ages getting us to blow on them and watching them move and he tried and tried to blow them himself so I really wanted to have something hanging from the ceiling that you could blow on and move.  I ended up just hanging some star garlands from the party store, and I strung up some party hats too (they look like a mess in this photo because I couldn't get a good angle).

Ollie got right to work blowing on them and smiling so I guess they did their job.

We put rainbow colored pinwheels all over the yard (we stocked up on them at the dollar store) and he loved looking out the window and watching them twirl.

We put a few extras around the house too.

 I also printed out some black and white copies of pictures of Ollie making faces and added party hats to them and put them up on the strings that I still have hanging down the hall from Christmas cards and Valentine sayings.

Speaking of party hats, I went party hat crazy.  I added pom-poms to hats for guests

 I made a simple hat for Ollie

 And I made surprise party hat favors for the guests to take home (which I meant to decorate, but I never got around to it)

I filled them with things that would move in the wind: tiny kites, fringed party whistles, touchable bubbles, and I had to add a little chocolate too since this was really mostly a grown-up party.  Then I just wrapped them up in lots of layers of crepe paper.  I got the idea from these surprise Santa hats.

Ollie is so easy to please, so far we've left everything up because it makes him so happy.

Valentines Exchange 2011

I like to think as Valentine's Day as a good opportunity to let the people around me know how much I love them.  I try to do nice things for Larry and the boys, but I also try to do something special for my friends.  For several years, I've been hosting valentine exchange with my friends and it's become one of my favorite days of the year.

This year, all the dishes and decorations that I normally use are in storage (not that I have that much, but at the moment I have zilch), but I decided not to let that stop me.  I picked up cheap paper doilies every time I saw them and then I decided to take advantage of our ten foot ceilings stung them up on bakers twine across our living room.

I love how they look at night and in the morning.

Then I took down the Christmas cards in the hall and used the thread already there to hang up more paper letters inspired by the ones we did for Kersten's house at Christmas.

The only other thing I did was draw hearts on the front door with chalk ink pens.

From Simply Radiant

As far as food goes, I went with cookies and milk and mom mom set everything up.  She even brought the table cloth and a banner that my sister-in-law Brenna made.

From Simply Radiant

And she brought cupcakes that I added some cute little hearts to.

 My friend rachel helped me make sugar cookies and chocolate cutout cookies the night before.  We stamped the cookies with different Valentine sayings like Be Mine, I love you, and I Heart You.  I put our some frosting and sprinkles and candy and let my friends decorate them and take extras home to their families

I forgot to take a picture of the drink all lined up, by I just bought milk, pink lemonade, and strawberry milk in individual bottles and tied small heart-shaped doilies around them.

I think it turned out cute and simple.

I'll try to get to posting about the valentines that everyone made this afternoon, but with two sugared up boys, you never know. . .

Lisa's Baby Shower - Part 4 - The Party Favors

This is my last baby shower post, I promise!

I wanted to come up with some kind of shower favor that would be useful, because I've gone home with a lot of cute favors that I had no idea what do to with that eventually had to be tossed. I always want to burn CDs for people, but since we like to keep things legal around here and through I-Tunes you can only burn things seven times, a CD wasn't a party favor option until recently when I-Tunes made it legal to upgrade your songs for a small fee and have a hayday burning as many copies as you like. Wahoo!

For Lisa's shower I put together a list of lullabies that I thought she would love to share with her little one (similar to the list I posted in the past with a few new discoveries).

I figure that even if you don't have a little one, you'll babysit a niece or nephew or grandchild and its always handy to know a lullaby or two. Is there anything that you would have added?

Lisa's Baby Shower - Part 3 - What we did at the shower

I knew that Lisa likes baby showers with some sort of activity since it makes it a little less awkward when a lot of the guest don't know each other. I wasn't sure what to do with such a big group, but finally decided to try embellishing onesies with fabric designs since that could be a simple, fast project so people could rotate through. I drew up a bunch of simple designs (most my own, you'll recognize them from some of my prints for Sycamore Street Press, and a few others that I couldn't resist adding). Then Lisa's mom provided the onesies and I picked up some fat quarters of fabric and Heat & Bond. I just laid out scissors, a cutting mat, circle punch, and pencils and let guest go to town.

I think they actually had a lot of fun making them. I even heard a few that were planning to make more at home, which made me feel good.

We hung the finished onesies as part of the shower decorations
Here are a few so you can see how simple and cute they turned out (Sorry they all have horrible lighting, but I sent them home with Lisa, of course, so I couldn't take photos later)


I struggle a bit with baby shower games because I'm not a fan of most of them. They can be gross or awkward and embarrassing for both the guests, and the guest of honor. I spotted a shower game that I loved a while back, available here, and made a similar quiz with Lisa's help. I was happy with the way that they turned out and wish that I got a picture of them all lined up.
The other game that we played was a name game, where guests tried to name some children's book characters that I provided pictures of. I hosted this game at another shower, but this time I blew up all of the pictures and framed them.
Then of course after the games and food, we oohed and aahed over Lisa's gifts as she opened them.

Lisa's Baby Shower - Part 2 - The Shower!

So I woke up the morning of Lisa's shower knowing that my house was a mess and I had no party decorations since I'd been busy planning games and activities. Whoops! Luckily, I bought extra paper for the invites so I started cutting and sewing and ten minutes later, I had a simple garland.

I also made a bunch of paper airplanes that I hung around my chandelier with fishing line (Pardon the backlit picture with no one smiling)
I was so grateful that Lisa's mom was in charge of food and I only had to gather drinks. I collected a bunch of different orange drinks in individual bottles and thought I went overboard and had way too many, but ended up with just enough.
And I couldn't resist these adding these blue paper straws.
I used extra scraps of paper to put little flags around one of the cake plates
and little paper airplanes for the mini red velvet cupcakes that Lisa's mom made.
She did such a great job with the food. She even made cookies using only orange M&M's

And had a lot of orange and blue candy.

The other thing that made things look really festive were the big round orange balloons Lisa's mom ordered, because Lisa LOVES balloons.

I hope Lisa felt spoiled on her special day!