Why, throw a birthday party of course!
Not just ANY birthday party -- a luau! A monkey luau!
I love my baby girl. She loves zoo animals... penguins, giraffes, elephants, monkeys. She's really into monkeys right now, so when I was deciding on a theme I just searched for "monkey birthday" and had lots of options.... Curious George (maybe), the sock monkey (not really into it), mod monkey (sorta cute), and then this cute luau monkey. The first thing I bought was packs of napkins on clearance at the party store, and voila, the planning began.
Decorations: I am on some local mommy Facebook groups, and I get great value from them. I posted something about my monkey luau and was wondering if anyone had done it before and had any tips/ideas or even decorations to give/sell me. I got two bites, woo hoo! One gal GAVE me some table decorations that matched my napkins perfectly, and another gal had a HUGE TRUNKFUL of stuff that matched, like NICE stuff that she hand-selected and organized to match the luau colors. I bought from her a couple birthday banners, streamer things to hang from the ceiling, party tableware, straws/utensils, ribbon, and more. She even had tons of other stuff I didn't buy since I needed to reign myself in :-)
The decorations turned out awesome. Just awesome.
I bought pretty dyed glitter daisies (I had a hard time finding non-Christmas flowers! Fake flowers, forget it! It was nice that we got real.). Laurel got two mylar balloons because she's 2 years old :-) Plus we had a luau teddy bear (Build-A-Bear from when I went to Hawaii with my mom in 2005!), and a beanie baby monkey. I even used some monkey fabric left over from a project on the counter (more on the project later!).
We hung a few from her doorway to make it even more special...
I decided to keep all the hanging streamer things up until her real birthday on Thursday. It's birthday celebration all week here!
Food: I like the monkey theme so I wanted to go with monkey/luau food. We had lots of tropical fruit... bananas (of course!!), pineapple, mango, grapes, clementines, and kiwi. No strawberries, sadly, I couldn't bring myself to spend $4 a pound in the middle of winter for them. We had veggies... snap peas, carrots, celery, and baby tomatoes. We had animal crackers, trail mix, creme puffs (LOVE creme puffs), teriyaki pineapple meatballs (crockpot), monkey bread (!! that I made from scratch!!), quiches (!! last minute, that I also made from scratch), and water. I wrapped the water with scrapbook paper (funny story: I was at JoAnns searching high and low for luau hibiscus paper and I finally bought something that would do but wasn't even what I really wanted, and I came home and found what in my craft stash?? Hibiscus paper! I already had what I wanted! I'm taking that other $10 pack of paper back!)
The food was awesome and a total hit. :-)
Goody bags: This was also lots of fun :-) Thank you Pinterest for the idea to turn brown baby bags into party favor bags. Awesome!!
The bags included five things....
- Monkey bubbles from Oriental Trading
- Three (3) monkey tattoos from Oriental Trading
- Monkey crayons from eBay (found them on Etsy first... think I bought from the same vendor on eBay)
- M&M baggies for most guests, but a few of our dairy-free ladies got candy necklaces from Winco
- and.... the big winner... homemade bean bags!!
I made 24 bean bags with JoAnns monkey fabric and rice! It was a fun little project! It didn't take too long to do. I think I cut them all out one night, and another night I started sewing them and turning them inside out. I must have started filling them one night, and then one other afternoon I finished them. I thought it was a cute little project, and everyone got to take one home!! I made green ones and pink ones. I bought a spool of pink thread awhile ago and I'm surprised at how often I'm using it!
Activities: We played "monkey in the middle" with some of the extra bean bags (mostly it was just throwing them around and catching them or piling them on our heads and letting them fall), I had coloring pages of monkeys with balloons or monkeys with birthday cakes (free printables online), and I had a stack of monkey books to read. I don't think anyone read the books... but I'll probably read them with Laurel over the next week or so. Shane got some from the library, plus we had a couple Curious George and Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, stuff like that.
I had extra tattoos I thought maybe some people would put on, but I didn't even really mention it to anyone so alas, we have lots extra. Laurel and I put on matching purple monkeys on our legs after everyone left. Anyone want monkey tattoos? I'll ship them to you :-)
Basically it was a huge playdate. Lots of toy trains and cars and blocks and play food all. over. my. house. But it was great. Happy children and good friends and much excitement.
Cake: Yup! Cake and ice cream!! This one was just Pinterest, and I knew I could do it. I made a chocolate chip cake, a 1 1/2 recipe (do that math!), and put it in a Pyrex bowl, one cake pan, and two Pyrex ramekins. The instructions are as follows: stack the dome on top of the flat round cake (just to give it more height), frost, attach some ears, frost some more, give it a face, and boom. Done and done. It wasn't that bad at all :-)
I was very non-committal about the cake. Did I want to do cupcakes with nilla wafers? Did I want a big monkey body with a tail made of cupcakes? Blah blah? Lots of ideas, but in the end I'm glad I went for more simple and doable.
Remember how I said it was the coldest day of the year? A few of our guests went outside to play... in a sleeveless shirt and a tutu, no less! (or should I say, "and nothing more" ?) Hilarious!!
Golly, it was fun!! I love entertaining like this. I love that I have a great house for it. We had 12 guests, plus my 2 kids, 14 little kiddos total, plus moms and dads for everyone. It was a blast!!! I cleaned up during "quiet time" and basically my house is cleaner now than it's been all week!
The kids gave Laurel the sweetest cutest little gifts. She got an adorable plush owl backpack, a bubble gun (yay!!), a cool duplo blocks farm set with a matching book, some mini construction equipment (seriously! she LOVES it!), books, puzzles, plus stamps, books, and a BIKE from Mom and Dad (yeah we got it at a yard sale for $10. She's in heaven.)
A word about Wesley... I love my son. I LOVE him. But he had a really hard time today, with the day being about someone else. Like, the day was ALL about someone else. Sigh. First he was insanely jealous she got two balloons. He is begging for a balloon (which I will totally buy him if he's good at Church tomorrow, I used to use balloons as bribery all the time), and was taking hers all day and making her cry. Sigh.
Wesley has this book we bought him a couple years ago, the "Wesley book," which we got online from a cool personalized site (Frecklebox.com) and the book helped him learn how to spell his name. It's a super cute book, where Wesley asks the clouds to spell his name and the ladybugs in the garden to spell his name, etc., and they do. It's ridiculously cute. WELL, you can see where I'm going with this, Laurel has been reading the Wesley book and she can totally spell Wesley's name. So it was high time we got her one.
I showed the book to Wesley earlier this week when I was wrapping it up in my room, and his eyes bugged out of their sockets and he was like CRAZZZZZY excited. In fact, for the next couple days he kept telling Laurel and Shane about "the Laurel book upstairs" and how we should "go get it" etc. I was like "WESLEY! It's a surprise!!" It didn't matter, it's not like Laurel cared or knew what was going on, but still. Wesley ---> bad at keeping surprises.
Anyway, once she opened it he was so excited. He took both books and was carrying them around the house. He kept showing her his pages and then her pages. Like, adorable and sweet and really fun.
We read them both before bed tonight.
So, overall, totally awesome morning. I saved a couple presents for her actual birthday, and maybe there will be cake left. We'll be hopeful.
I love my Laurel. I LOVE her. She is so wonderful and so sweet. She said Thank You to her friends and she beamed with joy when we sung Happy Birthday to her. She is ridiculously adorable and her hugs melt my heart. I love being her mommy.
Happy birthday, sweet baby girl. I can't believe you're almost 2!
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