my blog

happy birthday grey.

This past week we celebrated Grey’s 3rd birthday. I’d like to say that I can’t believe it’s been 3 whole years, but trust me, with this child it feels like at least 16. He’s our crazy little trouble maker, but despite his endless supply of energy we love him something fierce.

The theme I picked this year was a pirate party, and my original idea was to do a Jake and the Never Land Pirate theme (a new Disney cartoon for kids). But like most things in my life I’m ahead of the crowd and there is no party supplies out there to support that party. I really didn’t want to use skulls and dark colors, but it ended up that way anyway. Grey of course didn’t mind, and I think it turned out cute despite it being a little more mature than I wanted it to be.

Timbits (or donut hole) cannon balls.

I found this adorable little treasure chest at Hobby Lobby and filled it with some inexpensive “gold doubloons”.

I found an old piece of wood in the basement cut it in half, made the kids paint it red and I hammered it together to use as our “X marks the spot” cupcake stand.

I strung a net in the back window with a little pirate flag banner that matched the plates and napkins.

Darren got so tired of me taking pictures, that he actually expired before the party even started.

The kids each had their own hook, pirate eye patch, fun foam sword and telescope. (all from birthdayexpress.com)

Pirate gold cheese cubes.

I love using scrapbook paper as placemats, so cheap and easy!

I bought these little red cups in Australia, and it made me think of my sister and her family. Sigh, I miss them terribly.

Twix bar, pirate planks.

Hot dog pirate ships for supper. (Grey LOVES hotdogs!)

I had these little plastic swords and I wanted to use them so bad, so I stuck them in our strawberries last minute.

The whole table put together. Some other little details, like a little cup with chocolate gold coins and a glass bottle with a rolled up piece of paper I burned to make it look old, you can kind of see it at the back of the table. And that was it. Super fun!

I’m happy to say that he did much better this year blowing out his candles than last.

After dinner we headed outside to this little pirate play area I made on the back deck. The sandbox was full of pirate treasures for them to dig out, like necklaces, rings, marbles, bones and rubber bouncy balls.

The water table was a birthday surprise, and he loved it!

I made a little walk the plank board for the kids to walk across. Picked up an old piece of wood at the Habitat for Humanity for $3 and painted, ‘walk the plank’ across it. Paving stones borrowed from my awesome neighbor worked perfectly to hold it up.

Digging for gold!

We have been having beautiful weather here, and it was so nice to just play outside and do some fun stuff with the kids.

After we were done, it was inside to open presents!

And with the magic of the internet here they are all unwrapped before your very eyes.

Thanks so much for the card Grandma Workman, I have video of him dancing his little heart out. He loved it! ♥

finn’s 1st birthday.

There are so many adorable themes you can pick for little kids birthday parties, especially for the 1st one (and really it’s more for Mom and Dad, since baby could obviously care less) I decided on a little farm theme.

I started by making these banners a few weeks before the big event. They were very time consuming, but of course always worth the effort in the end.

The bigger banner along the back wall had little tiny cowboy hats and golden cowbells strung along with it.

I just punched two little holes into the side of the hat to string it on.

Maybe you noticed, or maybe you didn’t, but since I’m going to point it out to you, it’s probably all you’re going to see from now on, it was like the elephant in the room for me, but whatever.

In some of the pictures above you might have noticed that my frame was empty. Well that’s because some people’s idea of 1 hour developing is approximately 2 days. So the frame sat empty for his birthday. But through the power of Photoshop I added in the picture I wanted. (Trust me, all you’re going to see in every picture is that darn, blank frame)

A red frame that I took out the glass and added a burlap background and a little metal 1.

We kept the food really simple and had hotdogs, corn on the cob, watermelon and macaroni cheese.

And of course, milk to drink. (and apple juice!)

(to make this milk bottle, I just bought a plain white bottle and added black letter stickers to the side)

I made him a little chocolate cow cake. (which was a nightmare… it always is. Words of advice, don’t buy the sheets of colored fondant, they are garbage)

Finn was very excited about his cake and of course the attention and singing was holding him captive…

Until he tried to reach out and touch the candle. (I’m actually looking forward to watching the video of this, because we all screamed at the same time as he reached for it)

He didn’t make as much as a mess as I thought he would, but that doesn’t really surprise me either, his personality isn’t really wild and crazy either.

I only got him one present (the farm to match his birthday theme) but then I felt kind of bad, so last minute I bought him a little phone and I am glad I did, because he loved it.

Ava made Finn all sorts of farm themed cards with red barns and door that swing open and closed to reveal a hidden Happy Birthday. She is very creative and takes birthday cards very seriously.

One very tired and very happy little birthday boy.

ava’s 8th birthday.

For Ava’s 8th birthday this year, we celebrated with a rainbow theme party. We knew Grandma and Grandpa Coates would be flying in on the same day as her party, so we were very excited to set a place for both of them at our colorful table.

Each spot had it’s own color, with matching placemat, plate and drink.

I also had a matching shirt rolled up and wrapped in ribbon for each party guest at their spot. (I got an unbelievable deal on the t-shirts!)

The birthday girl wanted her place setting to be purple, but got her own special rainbow shirt to wear.

I bought a plain white t-shirt and ironed on a rainbow, glitter transfer. It worked perfectly for the event!

Along with the matching plates, drink and shirts, we also had bowls of rainbow skittles, little glass jars of crayons and fruit kabob skewers.

And of course, what party would be complete without some pom-pom’s; in a rainbow arch above the table.

Presents galore…

And some very special scriptures from Grandma and Grandpa.

And of course the cake….

Which we are still eating… this sucker was HUGE! But super yummy…

And that was her party. A little more simple than we’re used to around here, but fun anyways!

hunter’s 9th birthday

Finally, finally HOORAY!! Our computer has been giving us such grief lately, and when it decides to have a temper tantrum it just shuts off, and won’t turn back on until it’s ready. Weird I know. So it’s been very difficult to edit pictures and do blog posts with such a temperamental piece of equipment. But so far so good, it’s been kind to me this morning and I managed to finally get Hunter’s birthday pictures edited and ready to blog about.

His theme was Super Mario and I had a blast making the details for this. From the table décor to the cake I must say it’s been one of my favorites to date! (but don’t I always say that…)

                              dark mint chocolate Mario mustaches

             paper boxes with bricks I printed from the internet and glued to the sides.

                                golden coins for Mario to gather

My piranha plant. He’s got red hot tamales in his mouth like the fire balls he shoots. I made this all by myself, and was very proud of how it turned out.

                            little boo ghosts floating around the ceiling.

I made these adorable perler bead characters from the Mario game. They took hours to make, but I really loved the way they looked.

                             we drank 7-up, like Mario having 7 lives

   I cut green AstroTurf to use as placemats, like the green grass in the Mario game.

                        I baked 143 baby cupcakes for Hunter’s cake.

                                        and made an 8-bit Mario

                        someone liked the blue ones best!

Hunter's best friend Ammon and his family came over to help us celebrate.

 

We can hardly believe our oldest is 9, how fast the time is going. Before we know it, this one will be 9 too!

grey’s 2nd birthday {part 1}

Finally! A month later and 290 pictures picked through to showcase only the best, Grey’s birthday post is ready to share.

As you know, we picked a truck theme and our color palette was orange, yellow, black and brown. Like any good plan some things turned out really cute, and others completely flopped. I loved the overall look and it was simple enough for a 2 year olds party in my opinion. The best part, Grey loved it, and that’s all that matters. Okay, are you ready for picture overload? Here we go!

I did some simple décor inspired by a yellow dump truck that we already owned. But this isn’t just an ordinary truck, this one delivers peanut butter cups.

The plates were black plastic, and the little food dividers made them look just like tires.  I made napkin bands with little paper trucks, and tucked an orange fork in place.

The cups were probably the biggest, saddest disappointment of the whole party. Originally I had ordered cups in the shape of pylons (traffic cones) they were adorable. But in my haste I accidently ordered the wrong thing, so out of necessity last minute cups were created.

I bought plastic orange cups from the Dollar Store and found some leftover black straws from Halloween. I printed tire images from the internet and stuck them to the straw. Not as cute as what I had in mind, but they worked just fine.

Other little details were things like a bowl of Reece's Pieces, a perfect color match.

And some yellow paper lanterns. Which I had intended to make paper tires and stick them to the sides so they would look like trucks, but it looked really funny, so instead I just strung them up and it looked alright.

Food décor is the best part of parties, because you get to be really creative and eat it afterwards (who doesn’t like that!)

We had some spare tires (chocolate donuts)

And some chocolate truck pops. (If you’re looking for a last minute “lolly-pop” holder, peel the label off a can of formula and stick them in. Worked for someone I know…)

And one of my favorite parts of the party, was our gas station drink.

I printed a fuel label from the internet and stuck it to our “gas pump”.

Fill ‘er up!

I also made some adorable little orange slice race cars, with grapes for the wheels.

And the last decorative detail was the road table runner. The only thing, I didn’t end up sewing the street lines, I used iron on adhesive tape. (What, lazy my time is precious, no?)

Which leads nicely into the next part, the biggest, longest most painful part of any party (for me), the cake.

I’ll start with the base of the cake, see those cute little pylons (traffic cones) well, those were suppose to be drinking cups with straws, instead I ordered real life, miniature sized pylons, 6 of them to be exact. So I used them for my cake stand instead. Turned out pretty good, although I’m still bitter… those cups were SOOOOOO cute!

The top tier of the cake is suppose to be a tire. (even if it doesn’t look like it, humor me, my tears are mixed in with that fondant)

I made all the little street signs and the rocks out of gum paste. I drew the numbers and arrows on with an eatable marker.

For supper we had pizza (Grey’s favorite!!) and of course all the other goodies at the table.

Grey was so obsessed with the chocolate truck pops that he just kept eating them and putting them back, then taking another bite and putting it back.

Another adorable find was these kid utensils. Perfect hey!! (I thought so too.)

I found this shirt at Carters for him to wear on the party day. He matched the theme perfectly.

After dinner, we got all ready for Grey to blow out his candles. He was having a really hard time getting them to go out. He kept at it though…

When he finally got them both blown out, he was so excited!

The unfortunate part of trying to blow your candles out over and over and over again, is that you start getting a little bit desperate, and well, sloppy.

For example, I would like to show you one of his candle blowing pictures up close… see those little white flecks?

That would be spit and food.

Cake anyone?

Happy Birthday Buddy!

valentines dinner 2011

I have a love/hate relationship with Valentines day. I love it because it’s pink and frilly and full of hearts and love and gooey, gushy things. But in the same breath, I could really care less about the whole standard “holiday” greeting card, flowers, chocolate thing. I would much rather move onto more important things like my birthday and Mother’s Day. ♥

But with that being said, I love planning me a party! And so, instantly the gooey, gushy holiday becomes my friend. I’m not so into the decorating part, but I love the food part. Raspberries, chocolate, whipping cream and strawberries. Romantic fizzy drinks and heart shaped anything.

I’m not going to go into as much detail as I usually would, since V-day is over and I’m sure nobody cares that much, but if you’ve got a question please feel free to leave a comment. ♥

Our yummy dinner, pizza bread with heart shaped peperonis.

The cupcakes were a vanilla cake with pink buttercream frosting, topped with chocolate whipped cream and a fresh strawberry, drizzled with milk chocolate. (okay, not drizzled, but globbed with chocolate)

My huge pile of Valentines from the children. I am so loved! ♥

I wrote each of the kids love letters this year. Something that I hope they will treasure and really take to heart, because I meant every word.

And that was our dinner. And Darren, even though I told him not to get me anything, had gone out to get something and when he got back I was upset that I forgot to tell him to get me a disposable icing bag for my cupcakes. Well, how’s this for coincidence… guess what he got me for Valentines day? A re-useable fancy icing bag and coupler. Such a smart hubby I have.

Hope your day was mushy, gushy and full of love. ♥ ♥ ♥

milk and cookies.

I’m off to a very slow start this year with all the Christmas festivities at our house, but last night we managed to squeeze in a very fun milk and cookies party.

I had spent the day making various batches of cookies for the kids to sample, along with 3 different kinds of milk.

And who, might you say were we taste testing for…?

Well, Santa of course.

The cookies…

Rainbow sprinkle cookies, homemade chocolate chip, chocolate peanut butter and mini dunkers (store bought).

And the milk…

I made little tags to go on each of the mini jug handles- 2% milk, Chocolate milk and Eggnog. (the tag got cut off the pic, sorry)

The cups that they drank the milk out of had Oreo cookie straws, which I will admit are super yummy!!

We had little shooter glasses of milk with mini cookie chasers. (Don’t worry, they were cute, I am not teaching my kids how to be early alcoholics☺)

The kids each got to choose which of the milk and cookies were their favorite to leave for Santa on Christmas Eve. I don’t have to tell you which was their favorite drink…

And the cookie that won…

Well, I guess nothing can top Mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies.

We also watched this movie along with our milk and cookie snack.

A-dorable!!!

halloween dinner.

I really wanted to have a special Halloween dinner for my kids, but I knew that this week was already going to be really hectic with school parties and Cub activities, plus the Church Halloween party on Saturday, and we have Stake Conference on Sunday, so basically the best day to do it was yesterday. And to add more excitement/work to my day I decided to invite the Missionary’s as well.

The bad part about that… well they white washed our area (which means they brought in 2 brand new Missionary’s) So I didn’t know either of them, and they didn’t know us, at all. I really didn’t want them to think I was some crazy person having them over for dinner to some elaborate spooky dinner party on a random Wednesday night, so I decided to scale back my ideas a bit, but still do some fun food and table decor.

For drinks I wanted a unique beverage, so we had Mountain Dew, and to make it extra fun I added a yellow glow stick to make it eerie and glow like toxic waste.

(A fun idea would be to put a toxic waste sticker to go on the front of the your glass beaker)

The other beverage was this awesome Goblin Juice I found at the grocery store… but it tasted awful. So we didn’t drink it. But it sure looked cute!

Black and white dishes with silver charger plates, black dinner napkins and vampire teeth for each guest.

Blood red Jell-O with gummy spiders and worms.

 

My favorite part of the whole table…

My skeleton salad servers. I just about DIED when I saw these in the store. So, so adorable!!

For dessert we had vampire cupcakes, complete with bloody teeth marks.

The inside was filled with raspberry jam for a oozy surprise.

I hung some skeleton grim reapers in the back window.

And that’s about it. Nothing too fancy, but still fun for the kids and Mommy.

While all of this was going on, we had locked Grey into the living room to avoid any messes or destruction to the table… when I walked in and saw this…

He got to three of them before anyone noticed.

 

Then it was back to baby prison…

He was very excited about that as you can see.

lily’s 5th. {party decor}

I figured I’d better get these pictures posted before the mass amounts of new baby pictures you’ll flooded with soon. ♥

I was so excited to do her birthday this year. I had some cute mermaid ideas swirling around in my head and asked her if she wanted that as her party theme. She was very excited and wanted to make it a pool party too! Well, that worked fine for me too. (The only problem was how chilly it was on her actual birthday, so the pool was out.)

I got right to work a couple weeks before (shocked aren’t you!) I made her this super simple little outfit to wear on her special day.

I cut some pink seashells out of sparkly fabric and glued them onto a plain white t-shirt. The skirt was just a tube with 5-7 layers of tulle sewed around the bottom. Add an elastic waist band and done! She looked adorable! (but when doesn’t she)

As for decor, I wasn’t sure where to begin setting up an underwater themed party… but after doing a little brainstorming, I started with seaweed!

I bought 3 yards of a sheer green chiffon like fabric and folded it over and over again. I began cutting wavy lines up the the length of the fabric, not the width. (You want your strips as long as possible)

Once you’ve cut all of your fabric into strips, (and trust me this does not have to be perfect, in fact the less perfect the better) Make your way over to your sewing machine.

I started stitching down the center of the fabric using a long stitch length (4). Eventually my straight seams got sloppy, and I found out that it works better when you kind of wave the line anyways. Backstitch one end only!

The best part was that my machine was starting to gather the fabric for me. (Thank you!) I had planned on pulling the threads to gather it after I was done stitching anyways.

(Now I must apologize, this picture is awful. As it turns out, it’s the ONLY one I took of the seaweed hanging… can you believe it!!) I tried to keep it dark, so you can see it better… the trees in the background were competing with all that green.

So anyways, I loosely tied the green strips to my curtain rod and a funky underwater scene was set.

The little black dots you see in the picture are sparkly sequins that I hand strung onto thread and mixed them in between all the seaweed, they needed to have their picture taken at night time, so you could see them, but when you have 4 kids the inevitable is bound to happen, and Ava ripped them all down. :(

I had lofty ideas of making felt fish and stringing them up with the seaweed, but sometimes you just have to cut things from your task list, not enough hours in the day. ♥

Alright, onto the fun stuff… the TABLE!!!

We sipped fancy pink drinks with pink umbrellas and pink straws.

 

Along with our yummy drinks we had gold fish crackers, served in a tiny fish bowl…

 

And blue starfish brownie pops.

Much like Bakerella’s cake balls, but all I did was make a pan of brownies instead. I then used a cookie cutter to make the star fish shape; push on a lollypop stick and dip in blue chocolate melting wafers. Yummy!!!

I made the little white stands that the fish bowls were sitting on, out of a wooden circle disks and a candle stick holders.

Painted white and glued together. Topped with another tiny fish bowl (from the dollar store) and filled with colorful glass beads. The pink coral was an accidental score on my part. It fit perfectly. (Don’t discount the fish section of your local Wal-Mart people… treasures are waiting to be found. ☺)

Some other simple table decor was our place settings. Silver charger plates, with green, blue and white bowls. Pink napkins a sparkly blue table runner and a “puddle” of shiny blue fabric.

Draped from our light fixture was pink tulle netting that had some felt starfish “caught” in it.

I wish I could have spent more time on this, but my belly was too big to reach the center of the table, so I had Darren do it. The starfish were hand cut out of felt, stitched with pink embroidery floss and beads. I stuffed them with batting and glued them together.

Now onto the coolest part of her birthday table… the cake!!

Chocolate cupcakes frosted with (what else) butter cream frosting.

Each cake had it’s own ocean themed gum paste shape.

A starfish…

An oyster complete with shiny pearl…

 

A tiny little pink shell…

And a little blue fish blowing bubbles…

The top of the cake was covered in marshmallow fondant and topped with a special birthday cupcake (although Hunter ate that one…)

 

I love how it turned out.

After all was said and done, her party kind of didn’t end up really having anything to do with mermaids. LOL! But I think the whole concept was there, and this little Miss didn’t seem to mind at all.

Her presents and cutting of the cake will have to wait for another post. So, check back soon! xoxo!

PS. 1 more week until BABY DAY!!!

darren’s day.

I’ve had a theme picked out for Darren’s birthday party for a while now, I thought it was a pretty straight forward idea for him.

Any guesses to what I chose?

No?

Does this give you a hint?

What’s green and recycled and reused all over?

Darren’s birthday party.

Eww.. on second thought that sounds gross, re-used all over. Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

For those of you that don’t know, my husband just finished a 3 year degree in Renewable Energy. (In other words, he loves the earth and is saving the planet one windmill and solar panel at a time)

So I found it fitting to give him a “green” party. This time, I thought less about decor (hey if we’re saving the planet, we don’t want to buy stuff, the idea is NOT to buy, right?) So I went a few steps further and thought more about what “being green” means.

So our dinner consisted of local, organic meats and produce that I bought at the Farmers Market on Saturday morning. Which btw, seriously they open at 6:00am… on a SATURDAY!! My weary body was tired after my early morning veggie run.

Anyways, we had roasted baby potatoes, carrots and zucchini.

With fresh steamed corn. Aww… don’t worry we shucked it before we steamed it. ;)

And locally raised organic beef. (this next picture is kinda gross, so skip if you don’t like bloody meat pictures, I’ll even keep it small so you don’t have to look too close) You’re welcome. ;)

Anyways, dinner was YUMMY!! The kids totally noticed a difference in the taste of fresh veggies as opposed to what I’ve been buying at the grocery store.

Our next step on the green theme was the paper products used at his party. The plates were made from Bamboo, and the napkins from recycled products.

I even wrapped his presents in newspaper and used green tape to wrap them with. (green the color, not the environmental term)

So I figure I’m doing pretty darn good so far with my theme. My green paper lanterns were made from recycled paper, (and only cost 50 cents! For the both of them) the dangling arrow symbols will be recycled on some sort of scrapbook page or coloring project for my children.

And instead of using plastic cups (or even plastic water bottles which are worse) we had our yummy green drink out of recycled glass mason jars.

The drink was created by accident, when the store didn’t have any lime Kool-Aid left, so I had to get creative and this is what I came up with.

1 pkg lime Jell-O

1 cup boiling water

5 cups lemonade

1 bottle 7-up or Sprite

Dissolve Jell-O in boiling water. Add Jell-O mixture to lemonade and 7-up/Sprite. Serve with a lime wedge.

Easy huh. I’m told it was yummy. I didn’t have any. Sigh.

So I must confess. Making a “green” cake in the sense of using organic eggs, milk etc. just really wasn’t up my alley. I’m more a chocolate, butter frosting, sugar, sugar, sugar kind of gal. So I went the other direction with his cake, and made it a more literal kind of “green”.

Oh, alright, enough with the stalling, I think it turned out pretty darn cute, if you ask me. ;)

First, the torture of how I did it.

I baked 2 cakes. (6 inch and 8 inch I think…) Then I sliced them in half once cooled and piped a border of butter cream frosting to act as a dam for my filling.

I think I’m pretty smart, but I owe that little trick to Cake Boss! haha!

The filling was a package of vanilla pudding with only 1 cup of milk to make it thick and spreadable.

I’m sorry these pictures are so horrible, I was working against the clock here, but just had to take some pics in between.

So, slap the top layer back on. Drool.

Drool some more.

Then frost all over with butter cream.

<insert picture of cake completely frosted all over> <use imagination for this one>

Alright, the next step was to cover with fondant. Now if you know fondant, it dries quick. So I was more concerned with getting it on the cake than taking pictures of the process. So the finished cake will have to do.

The blue and green is marshmallow fondant (found in my neglected recipe section on left)

The top pieces are made out of gum paste. (so yes, everything on this cake is eatable!)

A close up… but don’t look too close, this was my first time working with gum paste, and I still have a lot to learn about the whole process. (I think the milk jug is my favorite)

The green bottle is made from a lime tootsie roll and just for fun, Darren liked the pop cans the best.

The whole thing took me quite a few hours, but when your molding gum paste objects. Making cake from scratch, whipping up butter cream frosting and mixing pudding, PLUS covering with fondant, you can practically see the hours adding up. But it was worth it.

Slight hijack…

Hey, like my fuzzy brown table runner. Found some old fabric in the basement from my newborn portrait days and thought it kinda looked rustic, organic, ‘green’ looking. It was cute, okay.

That’s 3 and 1 candles for 31, not 4. Even if Darren tries to convince you otherwise.

Cake was enjoyed by all.

We unwrapped gifts. Standard skittles, a cool new eco-friendly water bottle and some computer gadget thing that I have no idea what it does or even what it’s called. Just wrote it down from the history on the computer and passed it off to the guy working at Future Shop. Based on his reaction, I think I got the right one. ;)

 

I wanted to keep him guessing a little longer, so I taped the manual from the computer thing to a box of cookies. Plus the box it came in was rather large, and I really didn’t feel like piecing together newspaper to wrap it. ;)

And, so that was it. I tried my hardest to do a party that I know Darren would appreciate, all the while still enjoying the party planning aspect that I love to do. I of course had WAY more ideas for this theme, but sometimes with Darren less is more.

Happy Birthday Old Man!!