I skipped it when I discussed the other decorations, but there were a few items of note in the front hall.
As I mentioned in this post, we had a guest book. I think we missed a couple of people, but we have messages from most of our guests. Naturally, we used a Seuss book for the guest book.
We also had some favors for the adults as well as goodie bags for the kids.We had a basket of red and blue fish soaps that I bought on Etsy. The backs of the tags said, "Thanks for coming to my party."
The kids got goodie bags full of fun stuff. I got the bags at Target in early August. At the time they had a number of Seuss things in their dollar spot. I put name tags on the bags because I wasn't sure how a boy would feel if he was stuck with the last bag and it was a purple one. There were 4 different designs available: Horton, Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish.
Inside the bags were a number of items. Also from Target are 2 pins, an eraser, and some silly bands. (Yeah, I know Silly bands aren't so cool anymore, but I checked with one of the moms first and she thought they would still be appreciated. Or she wanted to see them, at any rate.) There also was a bookmark in each bag, which I picked up in Springfield when we went to the Seuss Sculpture Garden. The activity books I created. www.seussville.com has a TON of activity sheets that you can download- mazes, word searches, coloring pages, etc. I printed off a bunch of them and bound them together.
The final item in the bags were these crayon rolls. You can see it above when it's rolled up, and here it is unrolled. I sewed them using a variety of different Seuss fabrics.
The first thing that people saw as they came to the house was this wreath on the door. It was really easy to make, but it took a LOT of balloons, which means it cost more than I was hoping. I ended up using over 500 balloons. Here's a tutorial on how to make them. My only change was that I put 3 balloons on at a time.
Next up was the front hall. This will be covered in a separate post as it wasn't really decorated, but it did have some items of note.
The next room with decorations included Truffula Trees (The Lorax) and a pennant banner that I made from The Cat in the Hat. Before you freak out about me defacing books, these were old duplicate copies of books that I got on Craigslist. They cost me about 50 cents each.
The Truffula Trees were made using the Martha Stewart pom-pom tutorial and then attached to the closet doors. They were extremely easy to make! The trunks are construction paper with marker. I had thought about having Bennett finger paint the trunks, but I'm glad I went with this instead.
Each pennant is about 8" long and 6 " wide at the top. And all of the pages from the book are included, although I wasn't always consistent about which way the fronts and backs went. After cutting all the pages I then used a zig zag stitch to sew them to a piece of ribbon.
I also had Bennett's Seuss collection out throughout the house. People enjoyed looking at them and seeing all of the titles that they had never heard of before. Many people read some of them. And those who gave Bennett books as a gift were wandering around the house trying to see if we already had the one that they had purchased.
The books that I had in the front window were books that he wrote using his pen names of Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone. There also were two that he wrote but that other people illustrated.
In this room we also had a book that I've made for Bennett which includes a photo a day (for the most part) form the last year, as well as a small journaling card talking about what we did that day or any new skills he may have learned. I had hoped to put all of that info on the blog, in a weekly format, but that obviously never happened. People enjoyed flipping through the book looking at all of the pictures. One guest was even surprised that I had included the most recent pictures up through Bennett's actual birthday, 2 days prior. Thank you, CVS 1 hour photo!
Walking towards the kitchen I had the monthly photos that I took of Bennett with Paddington Bear. I also found some Cat in the Hat wall clings that I had around the photos. (With all of the decorations plus things we already had on the walls, I was running out of space!)
(This next photo was before I put up the clings, but gives an overall look)
In the kitchen we had more books on the hutch.
Over the beverages I had pictures from when we went to the Dr. Seuss Sculpture Garden in Springfield. Some of the photos include Bennett, and others are just of the sculptures. This led to multiple discussions of when we went there, why is it there, etc.
(Here's one of the photos.)
We then continue on into the dining room. There were more books in the windows.
We hung one of Bennett's preemie PJs in this room. How odd to think that these were big on him when he first wore them!
I came across a tutorial for Thing 1 and Thing 2 handprints. I knew I wanted them, but since we didn't own fingerpaints I asked Bennett's daycare if they would make them for us. So they did! They also made a Cat hat! He wasn't really a fan of the hat. :(
We had another banner in the living room. This one was Green Eggs and Ham. Like the other, this one also included all of the pages from the book.
And of course more books!
(Unfortunately he never wore these shoes.
They were too big and we thought he would be happier without them.)
There also was a slideshow running on the TV. This was some of my favorite pictures from the past year. It ended up being a little over 21 minutes long. But this was also a nice conversation piece, and I think people liked it.
And I think that completes our tour of all the decorations!
There were so many aspects of Bennett's party that I want to share, that it may be easiest to break it down into a few different posts. Here are the invitations that we sent. I worked with etsy seller, kcjones032, to create the invites. Chris and I came up with the text and decided what images to use, but she took care of all the scanning and editing. Definitely saved me some time! The first photo is a grainy phone picture, but after that are scans of the actual pages. (You can click on them to view them larger.)
These included images from some of our favorite Seuss books. Can you identify them? There are 9 different books pictured.
