Lizzie's 2nd Birthday {Top 10}

We just had Lizzie's 2nd birthday party on Sunday. It was a blast!

Now that I have hosted 2 birthday parties for my little girl, I think I've learned a couple of things.

Here are my top 10 birthday party tips

1 - Plan more than 5 days in advance. As my due date approaches rapidly, I realized that the month of June would be gone before I knew it, and Lizzie had been looking forward to a birthday party for weeks. So at the last minute I talked to my family, wrote up invitations, and jumped into high gear on preparations.
*bonus: avoid planning a birthday party for the 37th week of your pregnancy. I won't say much more than this: hormones, exhaustion, irrationality, irritability, and a time constraint.

2 - Do choose a theme. Last year, Lizzie was into balloons, so the "theme" was balloons. It gives a direction for the party, even if it's not anything elaborate. This year, several months ago, I found these super cute Very Hungry Caterpillar invitations at Target on clearance. So for $1.48 I had my theme. And Lizzie was on a Very Hungry Caterpillar kick, so it worked perfectly.

3 - Don't plan your birthday party on a holiday. For some reason, people tend to not have 1-3 PM free on Father's Day. Go figure. I knew it was a risk, but I knew it was going to be the day that worked for my family, and if some friends could come too, all the better. The reality is that if everyone I'd invited could have come, we would never have had enough space. We definitely would have had enough food, though!

4 - Be realistic about time. Within a 2 hour birthday party for a two-year-old, there's enough time to eat, blow out candles, eat cake, open presents, and hand out favors. If you want to add games or crafts or other activities, give yourself a longer time frame, or don't count on feeding people a full meal.
*bonus: don't plan it during a toddler's naptime. Lizzie was getting so sleepy while opening presents, she was almost impossible to move her from one gift to the next. Of course, she also LOVED her gifts and wanted to spend an hour playing with each one. Again, be realistic about time.

5 - Get as much as possible done before the party. This party was lunch immediately after church, which meant that not only did we have to prepare for the party, I had to get myself and a slow-moving child out the door and presentable for church, all before 9:30 AM. Although a little bit of last minute preparation is inevitable, I didn't want to still be decorating or laying out food as guests arrived. 
*bonus: pick up a couple of pizzas the night before, so you don't have to plan dinner the night before hosting a party, then have leftovers after the party.  I had everything cleaned up and put away shortly after everyone left, and got to enjoy a clean house, and a refrigerator stuffed with leftovers.

the spread! 
"and that night, he had a stomach ache."

6 - So, make lists--lots and lots of lists. I made a list of decorations and where they would go, a list of things to go in the favor bags, a list of things that needed to be done to the house, a grocery list, a "we forgot it at the grocery store so we have to go back" list, and a food list. The smartest thing I think I did was to make a map of the table layout, down to which tray would hold which food. It saved me many minutes of standing in the middle of the kitchen feeling confused.

7 - Ask someone else to help with pictures. While hostessing, tending to a busy toddler, and trying to eat herself, Mommy doesn't have time to take good pics. I mostly got a lot of poorly timed 'candid' shots. Fortunately, I did at least take pictures of the food, which I was kind of proud of.

8 - Apply a 'make your own' concept to foods for picky eaters (i.e., toddlers). We did a sandwich and fruit buffet, and cupcakes. Avoid the need for flatware. Use paper products so cleanup is a cinch.

Fact: multicolored clothes cover a multitude of stains

9 - Dress the birthday girl in multi-colored clothes, to hide the frosting dyed with half a bottle of artificial coloring. This was an accidental discovery, but I'm quite pleased with it.


10 - Enjoy the party!  Engage your guests, hug your birthday girl, read a story, laugh!

Sam takes a minute to read Harry the Dirty Dog

Let some things slide; perfection is not realistic. It's a party for a two year old, for crying out loud. If you Yes, I ran out of time to assemble PB&J sandwiches for the folks who didn't want lunchmeat. Yes, I forgot to slice the plums. No, we didn't get to do the "beautiful butterfly" craft I had ready to go just in case there was a lull. No, I didn't get to make every decoration I had wanted to. But there comes a point where it is necessary to stop the prep and enjoy yourself and your guests and your child. I'm glad I managed to do that. It was a lovely party, Lizzie was beaming from all the attention and the fun, and a good time was had by all.

Happy birthday, beautiful Lizzie!  You're the most amazing little girl I know.

So, about pregnancy

36 weeks, 3 days. Almost full term. Almost done being pregnant for the second time. Almost ready.

On an online forum someone posed the question, "What will you miss most about being pregnant?"

Really? Nothing. There is not a thing that I will miss about being pregnant, except maybe having the option to choose approximately when I sleep. Once Lizzie came, I never looked back.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy feeling movement, or getting a little extra courtesy at the grocery store. It's just that being pregnant is all about the hopefulness of what is to come. It's like waiting for a seed to come up out of the ground. The germination process is not what it's about, and frankly, it's hardly the fun part. (Perhaps the reason I haven't written a whole lot about my pregnancy has something to do with the fact that I don't want to come across as a complainer. I like the end result of pregnancy: a child. I am just not a fan of pregnancy in and of itself. Or maybe I just don't like my pregnant self all that much.)

Feeling her roll and kick and punch me in the bladder is all well and good, but inspecting her little feet and having her pull my hair with her little tiny fingers are infinitely better. Seeing my belly move when she gets hiccups or suddenly decides to change position is nothing like what it will be to look in her big eyes. Hearing her heartbeat (or as Lizzie says, "heart beep") on the doppler every couple of weeks is fun and reassuring, but I can't wait to hear her actual sweet little voice.

Sorm Fopt

I suppose you'll need a translation?

"S'orm Fopt" is the phonetic spelling of "storm stopped" in Lizzie-speak. We've just had a series of pretty intense thunderstorms blow through in the past few hours. At one point, when the trees were rocking and the dog was pacing, I told Lizzie that we would pray and ask Jesus to keep us safe in the storm. She had just gotten up from a nap and was still in that dazed, just-woke-up state. Her face brightened when I suggested we pray, because she gets "s'ared" when there is "tunner outside".

She likes to pray; she likes the story in her Baby's First Bible about Jesus being in the boat with his friends, and Jesus told the wind to stop blowing and the waves to be still, and Jesus could make the storm stop.

"Desus mate s'orm fop."

So we prayed. And the storm blew by much more quickly than I'd anticipated. Even minutes later on the radar on the weather update, there was a dip where there was less color over our area.

There were further waves of thunderstorm, but when Lizzie got scared as I tucked her into bed (it was quite an extended tucking in process) she asked me several times to pray: "Desus amen."

Because Desus mate s'orm go 'way. Because He likes to prove Himself to the little ones.