Teddy Bear Birthday Party

Just to show that you can get inspiration from just about anything and everything here is Little Man’s 1st Birthday – Teddy Bear Party.

When he was still a baby we started to call him Sugar Bear, still do from time to time.  I guess almost everyone has a baby nickname.  Don’t tell my husband I told you this but, his was Baby Cakes, he-he, shhhh!!  If I had one I don’t know it.  Anyways, so we had decided that that would be our theme. Teddy Bears, and go with Blue and Brown.  We were lucky enough to do a one year photo shoot with a GREAT Photographer, Cynthia.  I would recommend her all the way.  www.yourcandidmemories.com We did the shoot about a month before his birthday so we would have time to have the photos back and invites made up.  Cynthia did the invites for us and we thought they turned out great.  If you look close enough at Little Man’s shirt you will see that we made him a birthday shirt for photos and to wear the day of his party for everyone to see.  Way CUTE!!

Again I don’t have a lot of “GOOD” Pictures from this party either.  We didn’t decorate much (just blue everything, table cloth, plates, ect.) and we didn’t do any games or anything.  It was just a one year old party after all so there were a lot of adults.  We got the cutest cupcakes ever after I had searched the web and saw teddy bear cupcakes here. As you can see they turned out great!  Again, I did not try to attempt these, we ordered them from Candy Haven and their website is here.

Here are classic one year cake photos.

He did not know what was going on when we all started to sing Happy Birthday to him.

He knew to clap when we clapped though.

As for Favors, it was very hard to find Teddy Bear stuff.  I did find Teddy Bear Noise Makers, little sport like teddy bears from Oriental Trading Company and made Goodie bags with a simple Thank You Tag to match the theme again.  Yes I know there is a typo.

Okay, so that is all I have so far for Kid Birthday’s.  I hope you enjoyed!

P.S. –  What was your baby nickname?

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Here are some photos of Little Man’s 2nd Birthday.

 

Now almost everyone knows of this classic children’s book, THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR.  At the time it was Little’s favorite book  and we read it just about every night  for months before his birthday.  I thought what a great theme then a child’s book for a two-year old plus I was trying to think out of the box.   This is another theme where there was nothing out there so I had to come up with almost everything on my own for this one and did a lot of web searching.  You can find some Party Decor and Supplies but, they are in the UK and you can find them here if you want to go that way.  Now I think since then more people have seen this theme and have come up with packages to buy.

INVITE TIME: I just copy and pasted pictures of the book and printed out the invites on card stock.  Picture above.

STORY TIME: Per the invite once everyone got there we started out with Story Time.  We got all the kids on the floor and did an old fashion story time.  There was an older kid there so I asked her if she wanted to be the one to read the younger kids the book and she was happy to do so.

CRAFT TIME: Once that was done we went to do our crafts.  I had two small crafts; a Caterpillar and a Butterfly to go with the theme of course.  You will find a lot of crafts for this b/c a lot of teachers will cover this book in school.  We went with the Egg Carton Caterpillar.  I was collected egg cartons for about two months.  I realized that once I got the idea that we get eggs in styrofoam and that was not going to do well trying to paint.  So I put the word out to my family and friends to save back any paper/cardboard egg cartons.  Because we are talking about 2 year olds and preschoolers, I went ahead and pre-painted them all green.  I then bought Crafty Dab Paints from Michaels.  This way the kids could make the caterpillar theirs without a lot of mess.  We got what I call, googly eyes and pipe cleaners.

Next was the Butterfly Craft, also called Coffee Filter Butterfly Craft that I got from here.  Way easy! I used clothes pins for the body.  I went ahead and while I was pre painting the caterpillar bodies I pre-painted the clothes pins in various colors so the kids could have choices.  You color your filter with washable markers, once colored to your liking, you spray with a water bottle and let dry.  It can be messy (and we did all of this outside) I had a clothes line set up so we could hang them.  It does not take long to dry but once dry ( you might want to go do cake and come back) you fold your wings and clip the middle with your clothes pins and then wrap the pipe cleaners around the clothes pin to make the antenna.

So one tip.  I split the kids into two groups so they are not all fighting over the same craft supplies half of them started on the butterfly and the other half started on the caterpillar.  Then you just switch.

 

 

CAKE TIME: Now about the cake.  I saw versions of it online and we have a great bakery in our area that is awesome for custom cakes, Candy Haven.  I left this one up to them.  So I will give them all the credit.  I did see other online that made their own and more power to them!  People loved the cake.  It was the center piece of the party and I didn’t do a lot of decoration so this made up for it.  As you can see it was huge and took up half the table.

 

 

THANK YOU TIME: I wish I had photos for these but wasn’t thinking of a blog a year ago.  As Party Favors we gave everyone a miniature The Very Hungry Caterpillar books.  I found them from a book wholesaler online, here they are on Amazon.  I then put a simple green ribbon with print outs of  the below attached.

Thank you so much for coming!

We really appreciate it!

So if you are wanting something out of the box that is really cute for a kid’s birthday party here you go.  I did it so it can be done and feel free to copy anything you see here.  If you have any questions about anything I didn’t cover please feel free to ask.  I would be happy to answer any questions and would love to see people use these ideas again. It is too cute!

 

 

Fishing Party

So, I love to plan parties.  Baby Shower, Birthday, Holiday Parties….

I basically planned my own Baby Shower, not b/c my friend was not capable by any means but b/c I loved doing it and had my own ideas.  I hope to post some of my other parties soon.  But for now let me tell you about my son’s latest.

Last week was Little Man’s 3rd Birthday.  Over the summer my husband and him would go fishing on a regular basis and he really enjoyed it so we decided that the theme for his birthday party this year would be FISHING! Fishing at the lake fishing, not under the sea or ocean fish.  So I searched the web to get some ideas and picked a very simple fish design and ran with it.

See I am not one of those people who like to get a theme off of a store shelf.  Meaning, I don’t want to walk into Party City and pull a generic theme that is out dated.  Now don’t get me wrong.  By all means I wish I could go to the store and buy things that are already done and made for me, but the vision I have in my head and what is on the store shelf are not the same and I know that if I don’t go with my own ideas I will regret it.  By all means I also understand that in the next year or two I will have to go and get those packaged themes from the store based on my son’s request for an Iron Man Birthday party for example.

What a lot of people don’t realize when trying to think of a party theme is that somewhere someone has probably already done it and you hope they were cool enough to post it on the internet somewhere for you to find.  Hopefully like me 🙂  So a lot of what I do that you see I found on the web and just copied it for myself or altered to my liking.

First I started out with the invites.  My inspiration was something I saw on Martha Stewarts website.  Because it was fishing and the fact that my husband did not want the party to by at our house for the 3rd year in a row we went ahead and had it at the LAKE.  So appropriate!

Here is my version….

It says……

You are o-FISH-ally Invited!!

Liam is REELING in a party and it

is sure to be a WHOPPER!  He is

FISHING for friends to help him

celebrate his 3rd Birthday!

HOOK up Oct. 16th

DROP us a LINE at  and then ended it with

Come REEL in the fun.

They were not easy and very time-consuming.  I found pictures of the fish and the gummy worms on a hook and then printed those out individually and cut them individually along with the Word Bubbles and then glued everything on cardstock.  Once they were done I loved them and was so glad I did it.

Here are photos of the party.  We basically did everything you see.  We (my husband and I) made the signs, I made the cakes and cupcakes, along with the small fishing poles on the cupcakes.  I wrapped all the prizes, I made all the tackle box party favors.

Set the Scene

The cake I made myself and you can get details from here.

I always have a craft for the kids.  We made Stain Glass Fish out of Construction Paper, Contact Paper and Tissue Paper.  You can get detailed info here.

Now if you were to put your fish up to a light it would look like stained glass.

The kids absolutely LOVED the fishing game.  It was twice as big as a hit as I thought it would be.  We thought about getting the kids fishing poles and actually going to the lake and let them try to fish but when it came down to it we thought it would be a lot more hassle then it was worth and then thought that some of the parents might not appreciate that either if they were not to big into fishing and having their kids by the water.

We decided on a classic fishing game.  Before hand I took a permanent marker and put numbers on the bellies of the fish to match to a corresponding numbed prize.  I found a lot of different versions to this if you do not want to buy and ship the set to you.  I saw cut out of fish and putting a paper clip where the mouth is and put putting a magnet on a stick.  I saw where you could just have a box or some type of blue sheet and the kids throw the string over and wait for a “bite” and pull the line in and there is a “prize” or candy.  We got our from Lakeshore.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, that is basically it.  Little Man had a blast along with all the other kids!  The parents were impressed and I was very proud of this one.   I’m already looking forward to next years!