Happy 2nd Birthday!- A Very Hungry Caterpillar Party

Bennett came downstairs on Saturday to presents on the table.  However, those didn't interest him.  He wanted the (unfrosted) cupcakes that were in the container behind them.  Which was weird, because he's never been much interested in cake.  Or so school tells us.  We don't generally eat desserts at home.

But before he could open presents, we wanted to Skype with Grandma and Grandpa in Georgia.  They were able to sing to him and watch him blow out the candle on his birthday pancake.



We chatted while we ate, and then they watched Bennett open his presents from Mummy and Daddy, as well as the gifts that they had left when they visited over the summer plus gifts from Aunt Suzanne, Uncle Paul, Rosaline and Dekota.

And then came the fun of playing with the new presents!  He really liked the gift he got from Grandma and Grandpa and put lots of train down the mine ramp and through the waterfall.

Then it was time to take our monthly photo.  Bennett is pretty well trained.  When he sees the chair sitting by the basement door, he knows he needs to sit down for pictures.  And then when he was done, he wanted to put the chair back at his little table.

Daddy and Bennett played for a bit while Mummy worked on party prep and then it was time for lunch and nap.  He somewhat resisted the nap, but he must have been tired because he fell asleep pretty quickly.  And luckily he took a nice long nap which gave plenty of time to finish getting ready.

While he slept Mumma made lots of frosting and got the cakes and cupcakes finished.  Daddy ran out to pick up balloons, photos, and some food for the party.  When he got back we finished decorating, baked a pie, and realized we were quickly running out of time.  Mumma texted Awesome Auntie Mel to come and give an extra set of hands.  Which worked out well because shortly after she arrived Bennett woke up.  Mel got to work cutting up fruit while Mummy and Daddy worked on getting everything else ready and all too soon people were arriving. 

Here's the spread. (Daddy made all the stands that the fruit is on.  Worked well to add visual appeal plus it took up less table space than having all the plates on the table.)

On Monday he ate through one apple.  But he was still hungry.

On Tuesday he ate through two pears, but he was still hungry. (Mel added the "bite" marks to the apples and pears.)

On Wednesday he ate through three plums, but he was still hungry.

On Thursday he ate through four strawberries, but he was still hungry.

On Friday he ate through five oranges, but he was still hungry.

On Saturday he ate through one piece of chocolate cake...

... one ice cream cone...

... one pickle...

... one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami...

... one lollipop...

... one piece of cherry pie... (no one touched the pie, but of course I had to have it.)

... one sausage...

... one cupcake...

... and one piece of watermelon.  That night he had a stomachache!

Overall views of the dessert table and buffet table.

(I hand embroidered the text from the book by each food item on both sides of the table runner.)

This shot of the table is missing some of the food, but you can see the runner a bit better.

Beverage station. Bottles of water had either a picture of one of the fruits, a caterpillar, a 2 or a B.  The punch was Sprite mixed with a strawberry-lemonade concentrate that I made in early summer.

After eating it was time to go outside for some crafts.  There were three crafts that I had planned.

• Caterpillar bookmark made with their thumbprints.
• Egg carton caterpillar
• Tissue paper and clothespin butterfly

Again, I am super thankful for the help of my friends.  I showed them the supplies, told them (and showed- I'd made prototypes) what they were making, and they got everything set up and helped the kids.

I think I get negative points though for coming up with a craft that took too long to dry.  Sorry parents for making you take home gloopy caterpillars.

After crafts came cake!

Not a fan of his hat.

Blowing out the candles. With the candles on his pancakes he got one candle not problem but then took a few tries to get the second.  These he also had a bit of trouble with, and I think, in the end, I had to help.

After getting cleaned up we did the hokey-pokey.  He still needs to work on his left and right, but otherwise he does really well.

Then we ended with presents.  I won't bore you with those photos, but I would like to say how awesome and generous everyone is.  And it was the perfect amount.  I think we were on the last present when Bennett started to get tired of opening things.

Cutie Patootie Birthday Boy!

Decorations! I made 4 sets of these fruit garlands that we hung up in a few places. 

Caterpillar photos. I still have last year's photos up on the wall above the caterpillar.

Caterpillar balloons on the closet doors. Looks like someone erased the chalkboard a bit.

And in the front hall, in addition to some balloons and streamers, we had the giant cupcake and favors of "Caterpillar Food" (M&Ms).

Front Hall

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 Decorations

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!

The invitations

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.

A message to Bennett...

We had a guest book for everyone at Bennett's party to sign.  (More on that in a later post.)  Here's the message from Chris and I that was at the beginning.

It’s hard to believe that you are a year old already.  We’ve spent much of the past month reminiscing on how things were for us a year ago.  Although we had known about the problems with your heart since June, it was at the beginning of September when we learned how serious those problems were.  Being told that there is a 70 – 80% chance that your child may not survive the rest of the pregnancy or the birth is pretty sobering news.  There was a song by Pink that was on the radio a lot this time last year.  It has the line, “Have you ever looked fear in the face and said, ‘I just don’t care’?”  I can’t even tell you how many times I sat in my car on the way to or from work, an appointment, etc listening to that song with tears streaming down my face.  At that time we would alternate between planning for your future and planning your funeral.

But you are a fighter!  You arrived a little earlier than we expected, but even that first night you were astounding people with how well you were doing.  Daddy reported that when you were at the NICU at the Brigham (to be stabilized before being transported to Children’s) the nurses were all questioning something being wrong with you because you were doing so well.  We had been informed that you might be in the hospital until when your due date was.  This would have meant a 6 week stay, but you went home in only 3 weeks.  And your heart wasn’t what was keeping you in the Cardiac ICU for so long- it was just the fact that you were so tiny and not gaining much weight.

You had a number of medical problems, some more minor than others: tongue tie, GERD, bi-lateral kidney reflux, plagiocephaly, RSV, bronchiolitis, UTI, blood infection, etc.  But what has made you so awesome, is that with all of these problems, everyone has been astounded with how well you have recovered/ handled them.

MIX 104.1 has an annual telethon to support Children’s Hospital.  When you were born we talked about how we would have to become Dream Makers (a certain amount ever month) in honour of you.  Rather than just calling in, we went down to the hospital to make our pledges.  While we were there, we told your story to one of the D.J.’s and he later spoke about you on the air.  You also were mentioned on WKLB 102.5.  Daddy wrote an email telling of your ordeal and asking them to play Trace Adkins’ “All I Ask For Anymore” in celebration of your first birthday.

Constantly Daddy and I remark to one another how awesome you are.  And it’s true!  We can’t imagine life without you here.  Although you certainly are exhausting (we’ve gone from sleepless nights to chasing after you as you have learned to crawl and walk) we wouldn’t trade you for the world.

Happy 1^st birthday!!!

Love, Mumma and Daddy

Happy Birthday, Bennett!!!