You may notice stickers on the tablecloth. I let her pick out three types of stickers- she went with animals, party hats/cakes, and Elmo. Throughout the week we would sit at the table and she would get to decide where the stickers went, decorating her own tablecloth! It was a cool way to involve her in the birthday preparations.
Next I had to figure out the cake. I held up a box of yellow cake mix and a box of chocolate cake mix and thank goodness she went with chocolate- that's my girl! Autumn got to help bake her cake, too. Cream cheese frosting is great on anything in my opinion, so I whipped up a batch from scratch to top the cake. She had also picked out some colored star candles so I added them to the number 2 candle I had already found. (Side note- we now live at 6000 feet and yes, baking at altitude is different. Even though we followed the high altitude directions the cake ballooned up in the middle and then collapsed! I tried to cover it as best I could with the frosting.)
It was a fun and festive celebration, Autumn really seemed to enjoy herself, and we even got a dusting of snow on her birthday morning for her to play in- maybe it reminded her of Minnesota.
As a reminder, I recently started a new blog to document our process of moving from Minnesota to New Mexico and getting settled in. You can find it at http://www.mn2nm.blogspot.com/.
