Birthday Festivities

I wanted to do something to make Callum's birthday special and fun, but he doesn't have a lot of little friends here (my fault), and I really can't compete with the Mommy Bloggers and their sickeningly perfect and [I'm quite sure] amazingly time consuming parties, so I decided on the most obviously appropriate theme for Callum---Disney's Cars, of course---and went for it in the best way that a person can "go for it" in a single shopping trip at Walmart. :) It came together wonderfully and ended up looking much more impressive than I had anticipated, which was fun. His party was with family---Aunt Rachel, Uncle Ryan, Baby Noah, Bapa, Great Granny, and Great Grampy---but I decided that I should try to get some kids together as well. So the night before his birthday I texted a couple of girls from church and we spent a chilly Wednesday morning bouncing at a bouncy castle place near our home as an impromptu birthday celebration. Callum loved it, and so did his friends. I swear. :) Aunt Rachel and Baby Noah came along to help in case Callum got stuck in a bouncy maze or something, in which case his massively pregnant Mama wouldn't be of much help to him.

Garret and Cami partied with Cal. They had fun. I swear! :)

Baby Noah hung out in a Little Tykes car.

Whee!

Now on to the main event: the family party. I could have used my Cricut and a whole lot of time to create perfect invites, but, frankly, why bother? I spent five minutes creating a few fun invites on the computer with Word and clip art and then I let Callum color them. He was very excited to be part of the process and to choose which invitation would go to which relative. As you can tell by that little tongue sticking out, he took his job very seriously. Subconsciously sticking out his tongue when he is concentrating intensely is a genetic quirk that he inherited from his Bapa.

On to the dinner! I can't seem to master homemade pizza without a doughy center, but Callum said he wanted pizza and french fries (which I got him at McDonald's for lunch) for his birthday, so I decided to give it a go. I decided maybe it was my recipe, so I read up on making pizza and agonized over which recipe to use for FAR too long before I settled on one. (It's a pregnancy thing.....it turns me into a ridiculously stressed person, which I usually am not.) The big day came....and it seemed like my dough wasn't going to rise at all. I was quite frustrated and discouraged, but Rachel and Logan snapped me out of it and Logan went to Papa Murphy's and just bought some pizzas. Of course, by the time he came back my dough was rising beautifully, but I was so annoyed that I just tossed it and we ate the pizzas we had bought. That should have been the plan all along anyway! Luckily, the cake turned out a little better. My husband is a food snob, so I made both the cake and frosting from scratch (he helped with the frosting), which was a lot of work. Unfortunately, I used PINK food coloring absentmindedly instead of red. I ended up adding an entire jar of it waiting and waiting for it to turn red before I realized that it was PINK dye. Oh well. It's sortof reddish . . . right? Sadly, it was so potent at that point that a bit of frosting dropped onto my pretty new lavender shirt and stained it forever. Oh well, at least I got it on clearance! I am not a cake decorator, as is obvious, but the cake looks pretty cute and Callum was thrilled with it, so that's what counts. I did have to use Mater instead of Lightning McQueen, though, because McQueen's true red color really accentuated the fact that it was a pink cake. :)

My favorite parts of the night were playing "Pin the Lightning Bolt on Lightning McQueen" as a family and opening presents. Uncle Ryan was kind enough to draw McQueen on a poster board for me in order to spare us all from my artistic deficiencies, and Callum and Aunt Rachel colored it together. (Can you tell?) :) I also love the way the table came together. Thank you for the tablecloth idea, Pinterest! I took a plastic tablecloth, yellow duct tape, and a whole bunch of cars gathered from around the house and VOILA! A table Callum was thrilled about. He was also thrilled to put a sticker on each cup to make it more festive. I worked extremely hard on two gifts for Callum, but this post is getting a bit lengthy, so I am going to post pictures of them in the next post. Let's just say I am slowly becoming more like my own mother, at least in the area of developing one skill. Yea!

Everyone else was blindfolded, but Callum was a bit hesitant.

Happy birthday, precious boy! We love you dearly!!