The Boithday Week

This last week was the only week that matters in DD's entire year. She looks forward to her next birthday before her current birthday is over. This years preparations started, in her eyes, last year the week after her 3rd birhtday. We were going to have a princess party, a fairy party, a dino party, a halloween party, a chuckecheese party, a bubble party, and these are only the ones i can remember there were more much more.

Ultimately we decided on an OWL party! Cause hooo doesnt love owls ;)

I did lots of research on the interwebs to find the cutest owl party stuff and came across a blog where i used every thing they used(but i cut alot of corners) behold pictures:

the invite

the first 6 pillows(there were 11 in all) each one had
a pocket with a tootsie roll pop in it!

the first pillow

Then there was the cake...  i had originally seen an owl cake in parents magazine that i was going to use, but then ran across this book Cupcake Cakes in Wegmans, and thought it was such an awesome idea i had to go with it! This was not the cutest cake in the book, and i didnt do to good of a job on it. In hind sight i should have used homade butter cream icing for the white icing, instead i used a tub of icing, and it was not stiff enough to hold up over the cupcakes... i did make the chocolate icing(as per the books recipe) and it was super easy and really tasty so i am kicking my self in the butt for not going all the way and making the white icing too. The cupcakes were devils food cake and it was pretty delish :-d

We had the party at a local park, and i now know i we will never do it at our house again!! Bringing all the stuff to the park was a little bit of work, but oh how fun and easy the rest was. Cleaning up was so simple too! We let the kids play at the play area until everyone arrived and then gathered all of em up to go on a scavenger hunt. That morning(cause i kept putting it off) the husband and i went down the nature train and picked a bunch of leaves, i took pictures of them and put em this collage then taped them onto the front of paper lunch bags. We handed the paper bags out and took the kids down the trail and helped them find the items on the bag.

I was worried about them liking this since they were all about 4-5 years old, but it was AWESOME, they really really liked it!! At the end of the trail Husband was waiting with little favor boxes full of tootsie roll candy (cause its an owl theme hehe).

 Then we headed back for cake!! and pizza and fruit... it was all gone, by the end of the party, we had some hungry little owls!

notice the ballons sitting on the table in front of the cake, they were stuffed with felt Numbers that coincided with bags that had the owl pillows tucked inside. We blew up the ballos and let the kids pick one and pop it, then they got to open their own owl pillow!!

Then of course we opened presents, and then got kicked out of the park for closing time!

The big gift this year was... A BIKE, but not just any bike, a STRIDER bike. we ordered it off the google and payed for expedite shipping... and it still didnt get here on time so the monday after her party she got her bike.

we decided to test it out at the skate park, little guy had to take his bike too!

So thats it for the party let me show you what else we did that week.

FONDUE

 Some hats for some baby showers

And a much needed Recycle Can I am hoping that the pretty blue letters i sprayed on will convince Husband to stop throwing all my recycling into the trash bin on trash day and put it out on recycle day!

Well its been a hoot!! cant wait till next year, and niether can dd... she is already makin plans!