Thursday, February 9, 2012

A Fun and Thrifty 2nd Birthday

Last week was our daughter Autumn's second birthday. Wow, how time flies- she is getting to be such a big girl already. We had some family in town so I planned a lunch-time birthday celebration. After a few years of going Dollar Tree for party supplies, their offerings just didn't do it for me. I took Autumn to the Target party supply aisle and gave her some choices. She picked a fun plate with zoo animals on it- once she saw the hippo she was hooked. This played into my plan since one of her gifts from us was a stuffed hippo. I couldn't bring myself to spend $3.50 for a plain plastic tablecloth so it was back to the dollar store for a purple one- her current favorite color. I also grabbed a Happy Birthday banner to use to decorate the table.


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/.