HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOYS!!!

We had the boys' birthday party the other week. This year we just did one party for the both of them since they're birthdays are just a couple weeks apart and since we'd be inviting pretty much all the same people to both parties... Plus with Easter to plan around it was just too much. They wanted different kinds of cakes though so we had 2 cakes and we sang "Happy Birthday" twice.

First was all the prep and luckily my mom came early in the week to help me with everything. I couldn't have done it without her!!! First we had to get everything ready for the goody bags. We personalized some Hershey miniatures with a special think you from the boys:


Then I printed out some coloring pages with the boys' favorite characters on them and I wanted to include some crayons with them. Also wanted to include some sidewalk chalk since my boys LOVE that. But I didn't want to just throw the crayons and chalk in the goody bags loose, so I put them in bags with topper that match the mini candy bars. One side of the topper is a message from Owen and the other side is from Riley:


After that, the bags were ready to assemble with pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, stickers, small homemade coloring book, crayons, sidewalk chalk, and mini candy bars. Tucked it all in a brown paper bag that I'd stenciled each kids' inital on and Owen decorated (with my mom's help) and then tied the bags with some jute. I wanted to do something to add a little more color to it, but we just didn't have time so they're a little "Uncle Knit Knot"-ish.

It was a little warm in the sun, but we had the canopy set up and it wasn't too bad in the shade.

The kids had fun driving the cars around:


And Eric's boss loans us his small bounce house every year for the party but now that the kids are getting bigger we thought we needed something more so we rented a large one to go with it so the little kids could be on one while the big kids were on the other.

Then there's the gift that keeps on giving (don't ask!!):

Riley's cake request was originally for a Buzz Lightyear cake. I'd looked and looked online for some ideas for this but was really not feeling creative about it nor looking forward to it. Then he came up with the idea of a Frank cake. For those of you who have not seen the movie Cars 8 billion times, Frank is the combine tractor that chases Lightning and Mater out of the tractor field when they go tractor tippin'. My mom helped me out with this and luckily it came together very easily and turned out pretty much just like I imagined. And Riley loved it, so that's what mattered.

Owen wanted a Star Wars cake. It HAD to be blue with stars all over it. I took the easy way out and just bought some Star Wars people to go on it, so it ended up being a cake and present all in one! Owen can be a little picky about his cakes and tends to get upset if it doesn't end up the way he envisioned it, so I was a bit nervous with this one. Turns out he LOVED it! Yay!


All in all, it was a good day. Owen even said it was his best birthday ever (and he had a firetruck at his 3rd birthday party so that's really sayin' something!).

A few extra pics of the birthday boys: