For Abigial's 2nd Birthday Party, we wanted to start a new precedent. The First Birthday Party was so intense, and I knew I didn't want to continue hosting extremely large parties every year and make my kid think that was normal.
We set one big rule: only Abby's friends, and only the number of kids (+1) for that year's age.
No extended family, none of our friends' kids, with a goal of mostly homemade. I remember my birthday parties were usually low key, with just my cousins and a homemade cake. That's the feeling we are after.
She was pretty into animals around this time, and we had these sticker pages where you make faces on animals. She made them all herself and they were simultaneously creepy and hilarious, so we decided to make them the first thing when you walked in the door!
The one thing Abby insisted on was that you must have hats for a party, so we had a few different kinds of jungle hats for guests to wear.
We put out a jungle lego set in the living room for everyone to play with, and the kitchen was set up for everyone to play with, as well as extra sticker pages to make more creepy animal faces.
It's not a party without balloons, so we had those too.
I love this homemade cake. It was so easy and simple!
Chips and sandwiches, easiest party food ever.
I'm glad we started the tradition of taking a family photo with the cake, it's a perfect goal each year. She LOVED the hats.
I forgot to mention it was a zebra cake. Just alternating spoonfuls of chocolate and vanilla cake and it bakes up like this. Not any more difficult than a regular cake. We did 3 tiers because it's more fun than 2.
The friends we saw most often that year were Neil (of course) and Pearson and Green. She specifially requested Green but of course he brought his big sister!
The rule of 2 kids for 2 years, plus one to grow on worked out great. The friend to grow on were some kids we met at the library but have since lost touch with. The mom's name was Alison and she and her husband were from England.
This is awkward, but I think I was trying to capture the essence of how simple it was.
What can we say, she has very generous grandparents. Even with the extremely limited guest list, she had more than she ever needed by way of gifts! Our big gift was a wagon for walks to the park. And now I will go weep over how cute she and Neil were together and how much I miss them.
An amazing thing I did that year that I wish I had done the first year and remembered about the third year was take photos of Abby with each set of grandparents! Now that I have this in mind, I'll be able to start it up again because these are some of my favorite photos from the whole day.
I mean, this is just so cute. She will love seeing Pop and Gigi gazing at her when she's older!
Can't miss a photo of her and that darn monkey paci, the whole reason she had "paci teeth" back then.
Stop it, I'm not breathing anymore.
That progression is so funny, she's always been a ham!
And she begged Grandmommy to sit on the wagon with her.
When it came time to take a photo with Mom and Dad, she was done.
The next morning was her actual Birthday, and it was also Easter Sunday! We had a sweet time hunting for Easter eggs in our house before breakfast.
And then we had birthday cake pancakes for breakfast amid the remaining birthday party balloons.
What sweet face.
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