Rainbows For Breakfast

last week my baby girl had her second birthday so we threw her a party over the weekend.

there's few things i love to do more than coming up with a theme, colour scheme and all the fun little details for my kids parties.  i get to call the shots (well, i always ask my husband his opinion but usually get a generic "sounds good" response) and i get to create all the graphics to use for the invitations, labels, cake toppers, goodie bags, etc.  that's the best part.  well, and seeing my kids smiling faces when i see them having fun at their party, of course!

pinterest was very inspirational as well, you can recognize many of the decorations and menu ideas from my parties pinterest board.

i long to have a program for my mac like illustrator or photoshop or one of those fancy programs that lets you create your own graphics with ease, but alas i do not have the funds for such things, so i've taught myself how to draw almost anything i put my mind to using simple old microsoft word.

(note: if you're planning on taking on such an endeavour yourself may i suggest choosing "word publishing layout" in your project gallery which you can find listed first under "file".  the regular "word document" that opens automatically will not give you as much freedom with the details.)

i made my invitation, got it looking just the way i wanted, saved a screen capture of it (command+shift+4 and hold your mouse to rectangle-select the image you want automatically saved to your desktop as a .jpg).  then i sent it to staples.ca online to be printed so i don't waste my own ink.

my theme: rainbows!  what little girl doesn't love rainbows?
my colour scheme: ahem... rainbows.
venue: my in-law's place, which is much bigger than our place - and conveniently right upstairs!
time of day: morning, therefore we would serve breakfast.  i've never been to a breakfast party, i thought it sounded pretty darn sweet and it wouldn't interfere with afternoon naps or be as expensive as serving dinner.  although i think it was.

no rainbow party is complete without some rainbow bunting and rainbow balloons.

i cut the triangles out of construction paper and sewed them together with my sewing machine onto a piece of shiny red ribbon.

i chose rainbow coloured balloons and made tissue paper pom-poms (thanks martha stewart for the tutorial) hoping the balloons would float to the cieling and the white pom-pom could be the cloud under the rainbow... my helium was too weak or my pom-poms were too heavy, so they got to hang out on counters, above lamps and on the stair railing post.

using word, again, i created a rainbow placemat for each of the younger guests (there were 9 kids altogether) and set the table with them; a place card, a placemat for eating on, and a take-home gift all rolled into one.  i had them printed on heavy cardstock at staples and had them laminated.  they were perfect, i was really happy with how they turned out.

i decided a menu would be fun, make it like a restaurant menu hanging over the food table (the kitchen island, actually) so people could see everything available.  i had two printed on one poster, cut them out and double-sized taped them together so people could read it from either side.  the eggs & sausages were an afterthought, as you may be able to tell.

the food!  it was awesome.  i had lots of help from my husband, my dad, and my in-law's.  and we made way too much so there were a lot of leftovers, which was also awesome ;)

my home-made place cards, which i had printed onto card stock to be nice and sturdy, so people would know what they were eating, as if they couldn't tell...

a cake and cupcakes seemed a little much that early in the morning so we opted for rice krispie cupcakes instead with rainbow coloured icing.

cupcake toppers are always fun, too.  i cut them out and pasted them onto slightly larger cut out circles of construction paper with a half-short skewer sandwiched in between.

my father-in-law was kind enough to take all of the photos for me.  one of his cameras has this great fish-eye lens which he used to capture the chaos in the living room after gifts were opened.  this was only half of the guests.  i'm so glad we didn't have the party in my tiny house!

and, of course, when the party ended, there were goodie bags waiting for all of our smaller guests with my little graphic of molly thanking her friends for coming to celebrate her birthday with us!