Rainbow Birthday Party

For Petra’s birthday, she said she wanted a “rainbow birthday party” for turning two. She said this months ago, and kept asking when it was happening. So that’s the party she had.

She insisted on wearing her newly-acquired flower girl headband.

 

I decorated by making “rainbows” out of crepe paper streamers and putting them all over the place–from one light fixture to the other, to the corners of the walls…I also made these tissue paper “clouds” to cover my messy tape work.

The clouds have since fallen down, but we left the streamers up for the time being. They’re just so festive.

It was hard to get a good angle for a picture, since they were really all over the whole living room. This is the general idea.

For food (how do I never manage to get good pictures of the food???) we had “rainbow parfaits”–there in the front and center, you can see granola and yogurt, surrounded by strawberries, peaches, pineapple, kiwi, blue berries, and grapes. Then we layered them in those plastic cups. They were a HIT. The kids loved them.

Taste the rainbow.

We also had a rainbow veggie tray that JC made (cherry tomatoes, carrots, yellow bell peppers, broccoli and celery, blue corn chips), with popcorn to be “clouds.” I put out rainbow Twizzlers and gold-wrapped Hershey nuggets. Mom and Gary brought a tray of sandwiches. No one went hungry.

The cupcakes were fun. I was inspired by these ones, but couldn’t find the right candy to make the rainbows. So…we had chunks of rainbow instead. They were cute, anyway. I made them lemon, for no good reason other than I wanted to try this recipe (which was delicious!).

I heard no complaints about the chunky rainbows…

Petra was quite tickled with everyone singing to her.

She can’t quite blow out a candle, so friend James helped her.

Photo by ilse

I’m not big on “goodie bags,” but no one leaves my house empty-handed. JC’s sister Katie and brother-in-law Jeremiah were visiting shortly before the party, and they helped us make rainbow wands for the kids to take home. Some loved them, some didn’t care one way or another about them.

 

JC’s grandmother sent me some money to buy the kids’ birthday presents. Silas put his in his jars, but I used Petra’s to buy a sweet rainbow stacker I’ve had my eye on. She has been playing with it a rather surprising amount. I mean, it’s just some arches that fit together…but she loves it. Aaaand it doubled as a table decoration, so there’s that.

Then she drove six cars through it, bumper-to-bumper.

 

Petra definitely enjoyed everyone making a fuss over her.

Photo by ilse

It had been raining earlier in the day, but it stopped around the time the party got rolling. That was nice, because our small house is pretty tight with 20 people, eight of them children.

JC built a fire in the back yard.

Photo by ilse

I blew up balloons (always a winning idea).

And, of course, we turned on the bubble machine. Some of our young guests figured out how to get the bubbles to stick to the balloons!

Mom and Gary bought Petra (well, really both of them) a wagon, so we did wagon rides around the house.

Carlos, bless him, hauled some little people around.

Photo by Gary Auerbach

It doesn’t take much to keep us amused.

I may have mentioned before that, because my children’s birthdays are only three weeks apart, I’m alternating who gets a party each year (the other one gets a special family event, like this year’s camping extravaganza). People keep asking me if my kids are jealous of each other–not just when one has a birthday, but in general. So far, the answer is…not much. Petra gets upset if Silas is in my lap and she wants to be, but often we don’t even get that. They get along really well. We’re hoping that continues (KNOCK WOOD).

It doesn’t hurt that they have mostly the same friends, so a party for Petra might as well be a party for Silas. A few family people, who hadn’t seen Silas near his birthday, even brought him presents. Any time he seemed to start feeling a bit envious, he would just tell me about his plans for his “five birthday” (so far, Super Hero is the theme. Let’s hope he comes up with a better idea…).

Special gift for me–my sister decided, at the last minute, that she’d join us!

A good time, I can safely say, was had by all.