a baby shower for my bestie

This past weekend I had the pleasure and honor of co-hosting a baby shower for my best friend.  She's had part in hosting two wonderful baby showers for me (here and here), so I was beyond thrilled to return the favor.  Meg is due in early December with a sweet baby boy, and I am just beside myself excited to meet him.  I can't wait to watch my friend become a mama.  And just typing that makes my eyes well up.  Sheesh, I'm such a sap :o).

Our theme was 'Oh the Places He'll Go'.  No, not like the book.  No, not planes, trains and automobiles.  Maps and globes and suitcases, mmmkay?  Haha, the mama to be told me she planned to use globes or maps as well as burnt orange in the nursery, so I went with it.  I had many grand plans for this baby shower and I was so incredibly excited while planning it.  But of course the procrastinator in me just couldn't get going, and then suddenly it was a week to go and I had, um, nadda put together.  Overall I think it all turned out great, we had a good time, the sweet little man was showered with love and gifts, and Meg was happy.

And of course I just realized I have yet to take a picture of the invitation I designed, and I'm a wee bit too lazy to get off my butt and go do it, so that will be a separate post at some point.  Also, please please PLEASE excuse my crappy photography.  I of course was running behind and trying to snap these before everyone started eating and such.  Therefore I didn't make sure my settings were right nor did I check to see if things were in focus.  Whoops!  But you'll get the idea...

I of course used pinterest to round up all of my ideas.  Many of the recipes and decoration inspiration can be found here, on the board I created specifically for the shower.  Our menu was somewhat of a sampling of foods from around the world.  Greek layer dip, curried snowball, Asian chicken lettuce wraps, turkey taco bites and caprese skewers made up the appetizers, while the desserts consisted of pumpkin cake balls, French macarons (from Natasha's on the plaza) and mini salted caramel apple pie bites.  The take home favors for the guests were just a bag of snack mix (M&M's, peanuts, pretzels, Cheezits and yogurt covered raisins) tied with baker's twine and map circles. 

About those map circles... originally the plan was to find vintage maps to cut up and use for decor.  But Katelynn is a procrastinator just like me, therefore when she got around to making the garlands, there was no time to look for vintage maps.  So our circles are cut from print outs of a vintage map image found online.  They looked great and were cheap and easy enough.  So don't stress about finding the real deal if you're going for the same look.

I'm generally not a fan of shower games, but go figure we played three different ones.  When guests arrived, I had them fill out a bingo card with items they thought Meaghan might receive as a gift.  Then during the gift opening they crossed off spaces as they went.  It's was a fun and easy way to keep guests entertained and interested while the guest of honor is doing her thing.  Although baby shower gifts are my favorite to watch being opened anyway.  Baby stuff is just fun and cute.

Before the gift opening, we also 'celebrity baby match', at least that is what were calling it.  Katelynn put together a poster with pictures of celebrity couples, and also pictures of their babies.  Guests had to try and match the baby to the appropriate set of parents, and they got bonus points for knowing the child's first name.  I'm not sure I would have gotten more than two points or so, but Meaghan has a thing for celebrity gossip and the like, so we thought it was a fitting game for the party :o).

Our last game was 'The Price is Right.'  For our gift to Meaghan, my mom and I filled a basket with different baby necesscities (which of course I forgot to get a picture of).  Guests were given a sheet listing each item, and then I more or less opened the basket for Meaghan and described each item.  Everyone wrote down their best guess for what each item cost.  Whoever came closest to the basket's total, without going over, won a prize.  For prizes I wrapped up a $5 Starbucks gift card along with a small candle from Target.

We also had one activity for guests to complete.  Katelynn gathered some postcards, and then each guest wrote down some advice for the baby boy as he 'traveled through life.'  Clever, huh?  :o) 

Meaghan, I truly am so excited for you to become a mama.  You're going to be a natural.  I had so much fun putting this shower together for you, I love you!  And a huge thanks to my mom and Katelynn for putting everything together with me, I couldn't have done it without you!

our gender reveal party

As I've mentioned, Sunday we had our gender reveal party.  We opted to have a party, because Chris was unable to attend the ultrasound with me, and I thought it would be a fun way to celebrate baby number two.  So at the ultrasound the tech had me look away, checked the goods, sealed the money shot in one envelope, and wrote the sex of the baby on a piece of paper and sealed it in a different envelope.  My friend Jenny picked up the second envelope from me and baked us a cake with all the answers on the inside.  So for everyone who was a little unsure, no, Christopher and I had no idea if the baby was a boy or a girl before the party.

My goal for the party was to make it cute and fun but keep it simple.  In the grand scheme of things this is a completely unnecessary party (well, I suppose every party is but that is beside the point :o) and since we couldn't schedule the ultrasound until about four weeks in advance, I knew I wouldn't have a ton of time to plan (except for I totally could have in anticipation of the date, but again, beside the point).  With my mom's help I think we succeeded quite well.  We kept the food pretty simple and the decorations to a minimum.  I opted to use aqua for the boy color so we could reuse stuff from Ryann's birthday party (namely the table cloths).  I knew I didn't want straight pink for the girl color, so I was considering yellow, then my mom suggested coral.  Perfect.  I found a couple of parties for decor inspiration (here and here) and we were off and running.  And this is what came of it...

On the menu was oriental smoked turkey pinwheels, Mexican style pinwheels, BLT pinwheels, veggies with tomato basil hummus from Trader Joe's and fresh vegetable dip, fruit with brown sugar dip, cheese and crackers and spinach & artichoke dip from Sam's with pita chips and Tostitos.  For dessert we had the lemon reveal cake, white chocolate dipped sugar cookies and peanut butter graham cracker balls (which were incredibly delicious, but apparently incredibly messy to make according to my mother).  We also had some citrus fruit punch, but ours never froze to the slushy stage.  Still pretty good though.

I ordered little mustache pins from etsy seller GreySkiesBlue (she is on a little vacay right now).  Katie was amazing to work with, very prompt in her responses.  I would have gotten the bows from her too, but she didn't have any coral felt and I was set on having coral bows.  TamTam to the rescue.  My mom made some bow pins out of coral fabric using this tutorial.  I believe she ended up putting a couple of stitches in the part that goes around the longer rectangle because they wouldn't stay glued down, but overall I think it was pretty easy.  Then again I had nothing to do with them :o).

The cake topper was made based off this tutorial.  Even though I didn't exactly follow the directions, I still thought it turned out pretty dang cute.  And it paired perfectly with the adorable cake Jenny made.  We thought about going through a bakery for a cake so no one would know, but after taste testing a couple cakes (Jenny's are way tastier) and them telling me they couldn't do exactly what I wanted (which really, wasn't all that complicated in my opinion), I said screw it and asked Jenny to do it.  If you're in the KC area and need a cake for a party I think she just might be starting to branch out into baking for more people, if you wanted to be connected with her let me know!

The paper pinwheel decorations where made roughly following this tutorial.  At first I apparently couldn't follow the directions correctly and was having a tough time, but Evie thankfully responded to my e-mail and set me straight and we were good to go.  They were fairly simple to make once I streamlined the process in my own manner, so I think I'll try to make my own tutorial in the next few weeks.  All of the pinwheels and poms were attached to the wall using command strips.  I haven't tried to take them down yet, so I have no idea if the pinwheels will stay intact, or if I've ruined the wall...

For the garland on the fireplace I simply made some tiny poms and punched circles out of cardstock.  Then hot glued the crap out of them.  There are two circle on each spot, glued with their backs to each other around the ribbon.  It was a quick and easy project, and I, um, started it at 5am the morning of the party.  I had been behind on time and not feeling so hot the couple days before so I didn't get anything made, but then the morning of the party I couldn't sleep so I figured why not.  It took me maybe two hours to put together?  Probably less.  It was fairly simple.  The most time consuming part was the little poms.

Here are some more shots from the party...

As you can see, the guesses for a boy definitely outweighed those for a girl (which was quite the opposite on the blog, with 60 out of 99 voting girl).  Overall I thought the party was great and a fun way to find out what we were having.  Honestly it was a little shocking when we cut the cake, because Christopher wanted a boy so badly, and I think I had willed the baby to being a boy in my head for him, so the bright coral cake was quite a surprise.

Thank you to all of our family and friends who came and made the day special, and a HUGE thank you to my mama for helping me with all this.  Everyone knows I couldn't throw a party without you.  Next on our to-do list (yes, after picking Halloween costumes mom)?  Designing another little girl nursery.  :o)  Can't wait!

easy banana cake with nutella frosting

As I mentioned Christopher's birthday was this past Friday.  He was post call, so I made some pancakes and eggs for breakfast and Ryann gave him a card.  Don't you just love the one she picked out?  It took her a long time to decide, and Christopher almost ended up with a monkey picking his nose, but then she spotted Thomas WITH STICKERS! and she was sold.  After Chris was all rested up we grabbed some Chinese take-out for dinner and had some of the cake I baked.

Now, usually my mom does the cake making, but she was stuck with my sister in Miami, so, um, I had to make a cake.  I could have just bought a cake, but where is the fun in that?  Or just used a box mix and done a sheet cake, but again, that is kind of lame isn't it (if you do that for your significant other or anybody else it is not lame, I am not judging, just FYI).  I wanted a round frosted cake.  And 'bake and decorate a cake' is one of the things on my never going to get finished 101 in 1001 list.  So I figured why not go for it.

Except, I was scared.  I love baking, but, well, I'm not the best at it.  So I was worried I would completely screw up the recipe.  So I hopped on allrecipes.com and typed 'yellow cake mix' into the ingredients search box, and came across this banana cake recipe.  Perfect!  I had bananas!  I can do this!  I didn't feel like doing just a cream cheese frosting, but figured I love bananas and nutella, surely someone has a nutella frosting recipe.  And The Ginger Snap Girl did (along with a recipe for banana cake, which I'm sure is delicious, but I wanted to use the box mix because it was easy and I'm lazy sometimes...).  So bam.  Easy peasy banana cake with nutella frosting.

Now, my cake isn't exactly pretty, and technically I didn't decorate it, but I freaking made and frosted a cake ok?  Good enough for me.  Just a little word of advice though?  Don't try making the frosting in your family room during nap time.  Because ultimately you will make a giant mess and still wake up your child somehow...

Oh and the cake?  So incredibly tasty.  It was very moist and the perfect amount of banana flavor.  I would never have guessed that it was a box mix.  Chris agreed that it was better than a cake I would have bought at the grocery store.

Banana Cake

Ingredients

• 1 18.25 ounce box yellow cake mix
• 1 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 3 ripe bananas
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  Follow the instructions on your box of cake mix (don't include double the water, oil or eggs.  I just put them on the ingredients list so you wouldn't forget you needed them).
2. Mash your bananas with the baking soda, and mix into the cake batter.
3. Divide your batter into two round cake pans and bake for 22-28 minutes.

I used a 9 inch cake pan, and only had one.  So I baked my layers separately, about 24 minutes each layer I believe.  Also, to get my layers even, I used a small digital baking scale.  I weighed my bowl, then weighed again with all of the ingredients mixed and ready to go.  Subtracted the weight of the bowl, divided that number in half.  Then I set the cake pan on the scale while filling it with the appropriate weight of cake batter.  Do you have to get all mathematical and nerdy like that?  Absolutely not.  But again, baking isn't my strong point, so I was leaving as little room for error as possible.

Nutella Frosting
Just pop over to The Ginger Snap Girl's recipe.  I didn't change anything, but I did make an additional half batch just to make sure I had enough frosting, since her cake was a sheet cake and I had no idea if that would matter.  I think I had to add quite a bit of cream to make it a spreadable consistency.  Definitely at least four tablespoons, for my batch probably closer to six or seven.

Enjoy!

alphabet party - ryann's second birthday

Surprise!  I finally made myself sit down and upload all of the appropriate pictures and get them in this post.  So I'll start with the pictures since that is what most of you want anyway (who cares what I have to say right?  :o), and then I'll share some more details at the bottom.  Prepare yourself, it is a lot of pictures!

  

Planning Ryann's party this year was so much fun, mostly because she can vocalize her likes and dislikes, so I felt like I was really planning a party for HER.  Obviously she didn't care if I went all out or not, but I could pick foods that she liked, colors she liked, items she liked, it made it all so much more fun.  I knew I had to use purple because it is her favorite, even if I despise it, and then I came across this photo on pinterest that sparked my color scheme.

At first I had a hard time picking a theme for the party.  There are so many cool circus/carnival/western/princess/etc parties, but Ryann never had a real interest in any of those things on her own, so it seemed silly to plan a party around it.  I honestly can't remember what caused me to think 'alphabet', but when I finally decided on it, it was perfect.  Ryann learned her letters early on and has loved pointing them out since, so what better thing to incorporate into her party.  And it was so easy to make everything fit the alphabet theme.  I mean come on, everything starts with a letter :o).

I didn't take the alphabet theme as far as I probably could of, simply because once I saw this party and knew I wanted the tissue poms covering the ceiling, everything else was just a bonus.  We (uh, my husband) hung letters that I cut out with my silhouette among the poms.  To tie the food into the alphabet theme I just made up food labels emphasizing the first letter of each dish.  Oh and did you notice the letters in the flower vase?  We found two vases, one a bit smaller than the other.  I spray painted the letters to match the party colors and slipped them between the two vases, inspired by this.

The food was another area that I was aiming to please Ryann with.  She loves marshmallows, pretzel rods, m&ms, meatballs and fruit.  So that is what we had.  Chocolate dipped pretzel rods and chocolate dipped marshmallows.  I made these peanut butter m&m bars (so easy and so good in my opinion).  Alphabet sugar cookies were ordered from a local bakery.  Those also would have been easy enough to do ourselves, but I was trying to keep the prep work minimal after putting together all of the tissue poms.  We mixed up this fruit salad.  We also served meatballs made in the slow cooker thanks to this recipe (again, super easy).  My mom put together some mini macaroni and cheese bites, unfortunately I can't remember what recipe she used.  We used alphabet pasta for them, but you couldn't really see the letters when it was all baked together.  Also on the menu was hummus with pita slices and veggies, simply because Ryann used to say 'H is for Hummus!' without being prompted.

For drinks we made a batch of lemonade and added blue food coloring.  The green drink was from this recipe.  I purchased the tall glass bottles and straws from here, so many cute things on that site!

Now lets get back to all the tissue involved in this party.  Many many people have asked how we manage to make all those, how long it too, etc.  First of all, it was nuts.  It took a LONG time to make all those tissue poms.  I believe my mom and I made almost 100.  I honestly don't know how long it took, because we started in January.  Yes, January (the party was March 31st).  We had all the poms folded and trimmed by the week before the party.  And then I spent the week before the party fluffing them all (with again, a little help from my mom and some friends).  We stacked all the poms in my guest room during the week and hung them the night before the party.  It took my dad and Christopher about an hour to hang all the poms.  We used clear thumbtacks to attach them to the ceiling.  As much work as they were, I still love them.  Seriously, once they were all hung I couldn't stop jumping around all giddy like because the room looked awesome.  The only downfall was that they kept light from reflecting off the white ceiling, so our house with terrible lighting had even worse lighting for the party.  But I still loved them.  So much so that they stayed up for three months...

My sweet mother made a million little tissue poms as well.  The wreath on the front door was made with this tutorial, and the giant R on the mantel was made with this tutorial.  However she started with the R, and was following the directions for tissue size on that tutorial, and then after making a few poms following the tutorial on the wreath realized those poms looks much better.  So I would suggest cutting your tissue to the size described in the wreath tutorial.  Oh and I ordered all the tissue from Nashville Wraps.  Lots of pretty colors there.

oh hey Soph... creeper...

I forgot to make sure a good picture was taken of the favor bags, so the one above will have to do for reference.  I happened to come across these aqua paisley gift bags at a local paper store that was going out of business.  They matched the colors perfectly!  I used the silhouette to cut out our little guests' first initials and glued them to the bags.  Inside were alphabet crayons (a good tutorial here), alphabet stickers and an alphabet puzzle I found at the dollar store.  For all of our adult guests we had bags of trail mix we put together.  In there were some little alphabet cookies I also spotted at the dollar store.  I was impressed with the taste for dollar store cookies.

I think that just about covers everything.  Well actually, what is missing is the invitations.  Currently I can't locate my extras to take a picture.  I seriously can't figure out for the life of me where I put them.  But when I do I will share, because I loved them.

All photos (besides my crappy iphone pic of course) were taken by the lovely Adrienne Maples, but edited by yours truly.  So if the editing looks like crap definitely don't judge Adrienne!