Emma’s 6th Birthday Party—emoji

I’m running so far behind, I’m not sure I’m coming or going.

Three weeks ago, we celebrated our little one’s sixth birthday and I have yet to document this momentous event with pictures.

This time, I did it differently. The first five of her birthdays, we have celebrated at home with friends in an old fashioned birthday party. I’m a bit old fashioned actually and I have learned that when having big parties and renting out places, serving 3 decker cakes, and having lots of hoopla, this only gets harder the older they get. So, we have celebrated at home, with homemade cupcakes and games.

And now here comes the BUT.

But this year…….

She wanted to have her party at the gymnastics center. If you’ve been paying any bit of attention, you’ll know that she is crazy about emojis right now. So of course, it had to be an emoji party. She has pined over other little girls’ fancy, two layer cakes and asked if she could have a big cake. So, I bit the bullet and went with it, no matter how much it went against my grain.

Who’s to say my grain’s going the right direction, anyway?

It was a ton of fun, very stress free for me, and dare I say…..easy.

The kids got to jump, run, swing, balance, and hang like monkeys.

I even did my part by making some “poop” cupcakes. Of course, Emma helped.

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Another birthday in the books.

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A Sesame Street Shindig

This past weekend we had a fun 2 year old birthday party, complete with the whole Sesame street gang.  Initially I was just going to do Elmo, but once I got to checking out the internet, a.k.a Pinterest, for ideas, I knew the whole gang should be invited.

Every single idea was stolen fair and square.  I take no credit.

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I bought this cute Sesame street skirt and top from an Etsy shop called Sweet Sophia Designs.  There was about 3 seconds in my thought process where I thought I might attempt to make it, and then I quickly decided that my sanity was worth the price of the outfit.

I made the Welcome sign with cardboard letters wrapped in wrapping paper and hotglued with ribbon.

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I decided to go with cupcakes instead of a cake.  With the cupcakes we served a fruit tray, some goldfish, and some cookies.  To fit the theme; you know…..cookies for cookie monster, goldfish because Elmo loves his goldfish.

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This was an easy idea for making an Elmo face, except either my platter was too big or my strawberries were too sparse and it didn’t help that EK kept sneaking in the kitchen and stealing strawberries.

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These cupcakes were deceptively easy.  I watched several different methods and decided to go with the easiest.  I was so stressed about the amount of time these would take, but once me and my niece Ashlynn sat down, we had these decorated in less than one hour.  Probably 36 cupcakes.  I made cupcakes from a box cake mix.  Then I bought that canned colored icing like Cheez Whiz comes in.  I think if you study them they are pretty self-explanatory.  For the eyes, I used round white candy melts and we used a tube of black icing to draw on the pupils.   Cookie monster has a half chocolate chip cookie for a mouth and Elmo and Oscar have  half an oreo with gumdrop noses for Elmo.  We also just did some cupcakes with white icing and sprinkles just to change things up.

The cupcake tower is made with three cardboard circles, size 8″, 10″, and 12″ inch (or you could buy cardboard cake circles but I’m cheap).  I used styrofoam flower circles as the base, hotglued together, and green beans as the center dividers covered in cardstock paper.  The circles are covered in wrapping paper and then ribbon is glued around the cardboard circles.  Easy peasy, just a little time consuming.

We played a couple of games.  One was pin the nose on Elmo, which was just hilarious since noses were put all over the place and then a cookie monster beanbag toss, sort of.  They mostly just stood and placed the cookies into his mouth instead.

It is simply a cardboard box with a cookie monster face glued on with the mouth cut out.  I made 3 beanbag cookies by hot glueing felt circles together partway, filling it with beans or you can use rice, and glueing it closed. Those little triangles on top of the cookies are supposed to be chocolate chips, hehe.

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Emma had four 2 year old and three-year old friends come and I think they had a fun time.

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The sweetest part was telling Emma to tell her friends “Thank you” for the gifts.  Well, she was confused and thought the gift was FOR them instead of FROM them.  So she would open the present and then try to give it back to the giver.  So sweet.

I had also told her prior to the party that her friends would want to play with her toys and that it was okay and she needed to let them have their turns (she’s two remember?)  She did real good and let everyone do as they pleased, but  as soon as the door closed after the last guest left, she ran to her little pink jeep and yelled “Emma’s turn!”

Oh the fun we’re having!

Blogs where I stole ideas:

http://www.chickabug.com/blog/2013/07/sesame-street-second-birthday.html

Kate’s Sesame Street Birthday Party!