P's 2nd Birthday Party!

This weekend I threw my daughter an Elmo 2nd birthday party.  She loooooovessss Elmo, so it was the perfect thing.  I actually decided on Elmo because of this dress that my mother-in-law bought her:

I made the cake...Elmo, of course!

We had a lot of people coming, so I decided to do the Elmo face on a base layer with plain white frosting.  It was the perfect place to put her name and the candles (which she refused to blow out).


I also did Elmo cake pops.  (A post on that will come later.)

Many thanks to my friend Janelle at Peace Love & Cake Pops for the instructions on how to decorate them!  I also looked up pictures (because I need visuals) on Bakerella's site, but I did make a few modifications to accommodate my time frame and laziness!!


For food we had hotdogs (for the kids), BBQ (for the adults), slaw, chips, watermelon/tomato salad, a cheese tray, and THIS...

Yep...that's Elmo out of veggies.  I just love Pinterest!!  This is the blog I got the picture from...I didn't have time to utilize any of her other ideas, but there are some great ones there!


I spent the week browsing the internet and crafting for the decorations:

The tissue balls I got from this blog.  The yarn balloons can be found here.  I have tons of yarn, so I didn't even need to buy any for this project!  And the "2" I made up all by my own self!  It's just cut out of poster board (although cardboard probably would have been better, but I didn't have a big enough box laying around), with scraps of tissue paper hot-glued on.  I recycled the tissue paper from trimming the tissue balls...how economical and earth-friendly is that?!?!?


More decorations:

I bought these foam puzzle pieces when P was a baby and learning to sit up, so I could have something to put on the hardwoods in my kitchen.  Now she just likes to disassemble them and spread them all over my kitchen!  I put them up (9 tiles in all, with different Sesame Street characters) with masking tape on the wall in the breakfast nook where the kids ate.  I took the yellow/red color scheme for the party from the Elmo tile.

AND....for one of my favorite parts of all.....

The GOODY BAGS!!

 I was proud of these...they took me almost an entire evening to make.  They are craft bags from Michael's, and I used my scrapbooking tools to cut out the face pieces. Then stuck them on with a glue stick.  I found a picture in an Etsy store, and I made them better, I think!  Inside the treat bags I had a box of crayons, a snack bag of goldfish, a small Elmo coloring sheet, and some candy.  (Because, "Elmo loves his goldfish; his crayons too....")

The goldfish/crayon idea I unabashedly stole from my dear friend Michelle, who is going to throw her daughter an Elmo party in December!


It was a super fun party...we had over 20 kids there, plus adults, so my house was LOUD for the 2 hours of the party...but it was such fun.  I'll probably do it again next year...