Entertaining

A “Two Sweet” Birthday Party

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Birthday season has officially begun in our household! My three children have birthdays in March, April, and May (and mine falls in March as well), so we recently celebrated our youngest child turning TWO. Because of her love of sweets and anything involving chocolate, I chose “Two Sweet” as her birthday theme.

The Decor

As I usually do, I took to Pinterest to gather ideas and pick a color scheme. For this “Two Sweet” birthday party, I chose to use blue, teal, yellow, and several shades of pink, plus white. And to play off of the theme, I also incorporated sprinkles and confetti – although its hard to tell from the photos, some of the balloons are even filled with confetti.

I started my decorations by making a Happy Birthday banner from scrapbooking paper and my Cricut machine. I used a simple pennant shape in two different sizes, and solid colored scrapbooking paper from my stash that coordinated with my color scheme.

I’ve gotten plenty of use out of these wooden letters over the years. I have enough to spell several different numbers and I just spray paint them for each occasion. They were previously gold and bright blue, so I found a teal color spray paint in my garage to better match my colors for this party. I don’t get too caught up in everything being the same shade of blue or pink; as long as its within the same color family, it will all look good together in the end.

I also have a few of these paper mache numbers that I transform with spray paint too – and they make great photo props!

I used an old wooden window frame to display the birthday banner (it usually hangs in my entry way), and I fully intended to hang monthly photos of Kate from the past year but the wind was not cooperating so I settled for a few photos from her two-year photo shoot.

By far the biggest impact maker was the balloon garland I made. With the help of my mom, we used this balloon kit and pump to create this 20-foot balloon garland. I’ve found Hobby Lobby has the best prices on 12″ balloons – I bought most of the balloons there and used a few I had leftover from past parties.

I attached the balloon garland to the table leg with yarn, and also tied yarn around the balloon garland strip in the middle and opposite end in order to attach them to my house trim with a staple. Even though it was windy, this worked well to keep the balloon garland in place.

The Activities

The main attraction of this birthday party was the bounce house I borrowed from a friend (my 3-year old has already requested it at her party too) but I also set up a coloring station with this large scale printable from caravan. I printed it at my local Office Depot as an engineered print for just a few bucks.

Along with other birthday party staples like sidewalk chalk and bubbles, the kids decorated their own cupcakes with sprinkles and this was a huge hit. I used paint palettes as trays for the cupcakes and different sprinkle options and let the kids go to town. There were children ranging in age from 1 to 6 present at this shindig and they all throughly enjoyed decorating their own cupcake – I might just make this a regular party activity.

I do want to note that I waited to frost the cupcakes until right before serving them just to ensure the frosting wasn’t too set and that it would be wet enough for the sprinkles to still stick to it.

Party Favors

To play along with my ‘Two Sweet’ theme, I made jars of sprinkles for each kid to take home and use on ice cream or cookies or cupcakes of their own. I started with these jars from Hobby Lobby, then used 2″ round printable labels to add a thank you note. I actually used my Cricut machine to write on the labels but if you have a printer, it would be much faster to use that (trust me).

I created a custom mixture of sprinkles from sprinkles that I bought from a local cake decorating store – they sell sprinkles in bulk by the ounce and have lots of different colors to choose from, along with these pearl sprinkles, blue nonpareils, pink nonpareils, and star sprinkles.

You’ll notice the star sprinkles I linked are rainbow colored, and yes, that is the correct link. I removed all of the red, orange, green and purple stars before using them in my mix (I was committed to the color scheme, what can I say?). This is not unlike my son’s birthday party last year when I used red and orange Starburst for his space themed birthday party. Multiple people asked me where I bought just the red and orange Starburst. I didn’t. I bought a Costco sized bag of normal Starburst and I picked out the colors that went with my theme. It’s called ‘buy + edit’ – just a little pro tip for ya. I’ll use the leftover sprinkles for another party I’m sure.

The Menu

I kept the menu for this party simple with foods I could prep ahead of time and by catering the main dish. I’ve been ordering platters from Chick-fil-a for a while now and they are always a huge hit with the kids, I mean, who doesn’t love chicken nuggets?

Here’s what I served at the party:

And you know any birthday party wouldn’t be complete without my sister ordering cookies from Pearl’s Pastries.

Once again, Chelsie blows me away with her hand crafted cookies and all I told her was my theme and color scheme. She hits it out of the park every time we place an order, and her cookies taste delicious too!

It was so fun to celebrate our baby girl (who’s not a baby anymore!) and she had a blast hanging out with a few friends. I’ll be celebrating my birthday next week, then its onto our next birthday celebration in the first week of April – stay tuned for the 4-year old birthday coming up!

And here are a few other birthday party ideas:

What kind of birthday parties have you thrown for your kids? I’d love to hear about them. Comment below or connect with me on instagram @elleandjaydesign.

Party Sources

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