You are my Sunshine! Birthday Party

closeuplanterns “You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine! You make me happy when skies are grey. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you…”

This song fits my little one perfectly. If your little one or loved one makes your life brighter, then this is the party for them! My little girl just turned two. For our family party, I had fun decorating in colors as happy as she makes her family! She probably won’t remember much about her second birthday, but she really loved helping with the decorations and preparations. Decorating was so much fun and brightened our whole day.

I love tulle. Tulle is as fluffy, airy and fills tons of space. It is flexible, useful and reusable for any occasion, plus it is cheap. I keep a bunch of different colored tulle in storage along with my paper lanterns. Here are my favorite paper lantern online sellers 1,2, 3. Both the tulle and the lanterns are great to whip out for events and you don’t even have to buy anything!

First, I used the orange, yellow and white tulle gathered in the center and secured by an elastic then attached the elastic to the center light fixture. Then I taped the other ends of the tulle to the walls in a tent-like fashion. Hang some paper lanterns of differing sizes, colors, and lengths. Voila! You have a centerpiece and a fun decoration!

Liv loved it. She ran around saying “Wow! ‘range and yellow!” over and over again. jellojigglersstars cantalope

cupcakecloseup Since it was just a family gathering, we casually invited everyone over instead of having invitations. If I had used invitations, I love these three:1 (my personal fav) , 2, and 3.

We decided to serve some of Livy’s favorite orange and yellow snack foods: gold fish crackers, oranges, pineapple, mac&cheese and cantaloupe! I served orange star jello-jigglers, but my little one was not thrilled about the texture.

Instead of a cake, I made Orange Creamsicle Cupcakes topped with cupcake toppers featuring the birthday girl!

I intended to make a cake from a recipe Loralee has for a marvelous orange bundt cake. Loralee says it is moist and divine. Her recipe sounded similar to a recipe I had heard about that my neighbor-slash-wedding-cake-designer-friend bakes – and all her food is divine. Check out her cakes here. I’ll have to attempt making that bundt cake later because I didn’t have enough time to do it for this party and besides, we had oodles of cupcakes since my improvised recipe required two cake mixes! I’ll post the Orange’n’Creamscicle Cupcake recipe next. Just beware: this makes a TON of really good cupcakes.

The only disaster was after I had iced every single cupcake with lacy frosting, I tipped over the whole cupcake tower! Now, I rarely icing anything, so this was a true tragedy. And it happened just as guests began cupcaketower arriving and before I had taken any photos (sniffle). Honestly, I had to mourn for a few minutes while cleaning up the deliciously sticky icing off the table, floor, myself, etc. But the birthday girl didn’t even know and the show went on! So, the cupcakes were more delicious than they looked with a side of orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream swirl on the side. Despite a high 5:1 tagforfavors1 favors cupcakes to person ratio, there was not very many leftovers!

We played a DVD that my husband had made during the party. It had the last two years of pictures put into a slideshow format! It was fun to see how much our little sunshine has grown!

My favorite preparation for the party was the banner.

It said, “Sunshine” with her face on either end. I don’t have a good picture of the whole banner, but I am going to leave a link in our Printables section for you to download and print your own. It would be cute just for summer!

The favors were small boxes of gold fish crackers and bags of lemon drops.

The tag says: “Thank you for brightening my birthday!” This will also be available (sans my daughter’s face) later in the printables section.

I also LOVE this print from Nella Designs on Etsy which goes perfectly with our theme! Check her art out!