We Are The New Black: July 2011

My son turned 2 on July 2 and we had an amazing day celebrating with him! This year we had his party at a local park that has a sprayground. He loves water, so we knew this would be a hit! He also loves cars and trucks so we went with a Firetruck theme this year. You can see the invitations in this post. I was very happy with how everything turned out, so I thought I'd share some details here:

Most of the decorations were around the cake table, so we'll start there:

I actually bought the lanterns for his party last year and the colors worked again so I used them as a backdrop for the cake table. I got the idea from this photo I found on another blog.

I got the pieces for the banner on Etsy and assembled it myself and added a few additional touches. It worked perfectly with our theme!

We had a bunch of kids at the party so I got them all firetruck hats and fire hydrant cups as favors. I bought the hats and cups from Celebrate Express online.

Also in the photo above you can see Brady's cake and the cupcakes. We just did a simple cake for him so that he could blow out the candles. I bought this Fireman Mickey cake topper from Amazon. It had the number 1 on the fire hat, but DH scraped that off and painted on a 2.

Here's another look at the cupcakes. The cake and cupcakes were created by Eileen Carter (aka "The Cake Lady") and they were delicious and adorable as usual! I got the idea for the little firetrucks on top from this blog and Eileen was happy to create them. I think they are adorable!

On the right side of the cake table were the firetruck sugar cookie pops and water bottles with custom labels that I made (ignore my husband's sunglasses in the pic :):

For the water bottles I bought weatherproof labels from Online Labels and printed them on my inkjet printer. The fire truck sugar cookie pops were one of my favorite things from the party! When I made heart shaped cookie pops for Valentine's Day I knew I had to make them again for a party! I ordered the fire truck cookie cutter from ebay and used the same recipes that I used for the heart shaped cookies. They really are pretty simple to make and the hardest part is decorating... but if you don't try to be perfect that's easy, too! Here are a few photos from the making of the cookies:

This shows some cookies in the various stages of icing (the ones without sticks were my "test" cookies):

MrKLB helped me with some of the decorating... he drew on the ladders and number 2 for all of them because I was tired of leaning over the countertop to do it!

Here they are all packaged up at the party. I also made labels that went on the back that said "Thank you for coming to my party". This picture doesn't really do them justice...

Let's see... what else? Oh, MrKLB also made these cool firetruck centerpieces out of diaper boxes:

They were a last minute addition to the decorations and I think they turned out great! He is so creative! Now Brady has one of these in his room and likes to sit in it and have us push him around!

The centerpieces leads me to another star of the show... the GIANT balloons!

I got the idea that I wanted to do giant balloons and thought that when I asked MrKLB about it he would say they weren't worth it. Well, I asked him and his response was "I love giant balloons!" So, we had to do it! Let me just say, these are so cool but such a pain in the butt! I bought the balloons in a package at Party City and had them inflate them. Well, they are 36" each, so I could only fit 4 into my SUV with the seats folded down! So, I had to make 2 trips to Party City to get all of them. Then, this is how we transported them to the party:

Here's a picture of Brady holding some of the balloons after the party. I love it!

I think that really covers the highlights of the party. It was a lot of fun and I think everyone had a good time! Here's a picture of the 3 (well, almost 4!) of us before the party: