Sunday, June 22, 2014

Celebrate with Tigger and Pooh

A little note ~ I started Ava's birthday post months ago, probably not as punctual as six months ago when Ava's birthday was BUT I did at least start it. And I realized it never got published. I figure that before I post Gavin's birthday pictures, I should give sister some bloggy time.

Ava's second birthday was a lot of fun to plan and thankfully fairly inexpensive as we either had or made many of the decorations. The biggest expense was going to be the cake but at the last minute our cake lady had a family emergency.  So, I did not break my streak of making the kids' cakes. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but a big thanks to Pinterest and my husband for being there every step of the way.

For the invitations, we took pictures of Ava in the backyard with a few 100 Acre Wood friends. Dave then used his creative genius to design the invite. Several pictures were in the running, but we settled on this one.
Guests were greeted by the dancing and talking Tigger and Pooh my mother in law let us borrow. 
 

We may or may not have an assortment of large Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals. Each kid took their picture and got their copy in a thank you note. 
 
Ava is holding the only surviving Tigger from my toddler years and I had many.
 The party favors were bags of Honey Combs. As a parent I am realizing that less take home items, means less little toys to pick up everywhere. Excuse the Nutcracker in the background. It was four days before Christmas.
A lot of the food items came from various Pinned items. For the food labels, I took two Popsicle sticks, broke one in three pieces and hot glued them together on a cardboard base. Then I covered the base with moss and borrowed Pooh Bear's fancy writing style. 
 
 Here's Rabbit's Vegetable Garden and Roo's Ranch Dip as well as Piglets in a blanket.
 
The Hunny Bee cakes were simply white cupcakes I picked up and added white sprinkles and candy bees to the top.  
 
And while the cake did not look professional looking, I managed to hide some of the imperfections with ribbon and fresh flowers. The honey infused cake tasted pretty yummy though. So that the plush Tigger and Pooh could sit on top of the cake, I cut out a piece of cardboard into a circle and hot glued more moss to the top.
 
One of my favorite ways to decorate for parties are with flowers, pictures and books that tie into the theme. I have even snuck in some flowers for Gavin's parties before.
 
Since this was a party for a two year old, we tried to make the activities toddler friendly. First up- coloring pages. I bought a couple of terra cotta pots and painted them yellow on top to look like honey. Then added the word Hunny in black paint. Some of the pots were also used to hold utensils on the table.
It was cheap/cute decoration and one of these pots is currently used as decoration in our play room.
 The kids played toss the bees in the bucket. I glued some black felt around bean bags and added yellow felt stripes.
And of course there was pin the tail on Eyeore.
 And what two year old doesn't love a fancy new ride to cap off her birthday?