Porcupine’s First Birthday Party

As we’re coming up on his second birthday party, I thought I’d finally get around to posting a few pictures from Porcupine’s first birthday party. We had a blast and everything turned out just the way I wanted it to! (Except all the snow on the ground, but what can you do when you have a baby in February in Indiana!)

The theme was kind-of Alphabet-y. Everything I do is Alphabet-y (I still have to post baby shower alphabet things! Another thing to add to the to-do list!) I found inspiration for an Alphabet-y invitation from this blog.

 (Fonts are Century Schoolbook and LaurenScript. I used the “Pencil Sketch” feature on Picasa to make Porcupine’s picture seem schoolbook-y. Then I printed them on cardstock – 2 to a page.)

I’d been pinning all kinds of cute desserts forever, so I just made a bunch! Cupcakes with rainbows, goldfish, teddies, “balloons”, and of course As, Bs, and Cs!

My mother-in-law made Porcupine a giant cupcake to smash in to!

I ordered the “one” plates from BirthdayExpress.com, along with some other things. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t just find blue “one” plates locally! Oh well…I love internet shopping!

I knew I wanted some kind of cool “backdrop” (again, I owe you a baby shower post, because there, we did balloons, kind of like this.) made of balloons or streamers or something. Then, on the same blog where I found the invitation inspiration, I found a cool “Happy Birthday” sign inspiration.

 I cut the letters out on my Cricut using the font from the “A Child’s Year” cartridge.

Our house was full of family and fun, and I couldn’t have asked for a better party.

I think Porcupine had a great time, too…and he loved his cake!

Hopefully, I’ll post pictures from his second birthday in a more timely manner! And I’ll get to work on a baby shower post, pronto!

A Cold Stone Creamery Birthday

When I saw this lemon soda float picture from MyRecipes.com in my inbox earlier this summer, I thought that it’d be something fun to serve at a small birthday picnic. I figured I could buy a couple of tubs of ice cream ($10 total at Aldi) and some sparkling lemonade and other flavored sodas (maybe $15 at Aldi), set out some cute straws and tall cups and be done.

Looks delicious, doesn’t it?

But we don’t do things that simply in the our household.

I didn’t know how I could keep the ice cream cold while serving it in an adorable way (taking ice cream in and out of an overstuffed freezer just isn’t what I imagined Martha Stewart would do). 

Then my friend Pam mentioned to us that Cold Stone Creamery does catering, Brian looked into it, and that’s how we ended up with this in our back yard!



Inside the refrigerated Cold Stone cart were 50 double scoops of ice cream.



They provided us with 4 toppings, fudge, and caramel, and I found even more fun toppings to serve. Cookies, mini Reese’s, chocolate chips, M&Ms, cashews, sprinkles, star-shaped marshmallows….you name it, we were prepared to put it on ice cream.





I still wanted to have some ice cream floats (it was my original idea after all!), so I found Goose Island Root Beer, IBC Cream Soda, sparkling lemonade, and some grape and orange soda to serve with big fat straws and tall clear cups. :)







And my friend Pam (who suggested the Cold Stone cart) made this awesome cake that looked like a melting ice cream cone.



My friend Jessica and I had fun decorating the setup with some paper garlands, paper lanterns, and paper fans. We made the blue polka-dot ones out of napkins! (As I was cleaning up the back yard, I purposely left up these vines for decorative purposes. I was inspired by Pinterest, of course!) ;)




(And at night, these paper lanterns lit up!)

Everyone had a ton of fun picking out their ice cream and toppings :)


It was still just a small picnic, so there was lots and lots of ice cream to go around. (We also served food, I swear!) It was a super fun way to celebrate a birthday.



Happy 30th Cold Stone Creamery birthday to me! :)

See these pictures bigger at Flickr…so you can zoom in on details and deliciousness! :)
(And feel free to comment comment comment on posts to help me feel awesome!!)