Happy Birthday To Us!

Oooooooooof...  Happy Tuesday! Wow. I'm back. Took an unexpected bloggy break there...

That's because I just said hasta la vista to a jam-packed birthday week and weekend.  Over the last few days, The Boy, Dia and I celebrated our 8th, 20th and um... OLDer birthdays respectively. The week started out with a whirlwind road trip to visit my girls, Elle and Dia, who share living quarters in Toronto. We spent a lovely afternoon with them catching up on life, school and work, and chatting about food and movies over the yummy vegetarian offerings at a small local restaurant. The service was great and the staff let us linger. We had a really really nice time. Despite the fact that they flew the coop a few years ago now, I still think it strange to visit these adults (!!!) that are my children, and see them living independently from us. Working. Learning. All by themselves. They seem to be handling it just fine. How does this happen, I often wonder. How's it even possible?... I guess that's just what kids do, eh?

Here's a pic of my beautiful Dia taken at the aforementioned lunch.

The next few days I spent getting ready for The Boy's Bowling Birthday party which we celebrated this past Sunday afternoon with 12 of his friends (boys only as he stipulated). The pizza meal was held upstairs in the bowling building and we only had a few minutes to spruce up the space so I wanted the decorations to be effective yet super-simple at the same time.

We needed balloons o' course... So I concocted these balloon trees which The Boy dubbed "balloon supernovae". That name rocks my socks so it stuck! I made the trees two days prior, and the day of the party we just plunked the gravel-filled plastic jugs down in the center of the tables and stabbed in the stems. Nice and easy!

The Boy is a huge fan of airplanes so I rummaged through my garland box for the colourful paper airplane garland from last year (he digs it) and divided the lengths into two batches. Then I hung the lengths with bread wrappers onto two wire hangers. When we got to the bowling alley I simply hung the hangers lickety-split on an overhead beam.

For cake, The Boy requested chocolate. I chose to do the chocolate cupcake thing and I'm so glad I did because they were tast-EE! I baked the cupcakes the day before the party and iced them the morning of. I topped them with piped buttercream frosting and finished them off with one upside-down red candy wafer (used as is) and a Smartie. Delicious and do-able (even for a non-cook like me)...

The little personalized handmade goodie bags Lo and I put together (using this template) for each guest went over well too. I made the bags a few at a time over the two weeks prior to the big day. We filled them with candy, notepads, pencils, erasers, hockey cards and one of my all-time favourite origami gizmos.

When we sent out invitations we specified "no gifts" because our little one has more than enough. We were overjoyed by all the lovely handmade cards that each child brought instead. Reading through them at the end of the day was definitely a highlight for me. They were just so sweet!

I can't say the day wasn't without its challenges. Kids playing catch with 10 lb bowling balls, for instance. Kids running down bowling lanes. And there was that one tiny injury too. Small hand caught in swivel chair... Oooooweeeee... But after the obvious pain and the gush of tears, the little guy bucked up and kept playing. Kids are amazing, aren't they?

But on the whole, the party was a success, I think. We're not used to having 13 boy-children in tow, you know? But they had fun and Lo and I managed well in my opinion. We stayed pretty relaxed through it all. And The Boy had a blast which was the ultimate goal!

So the week of birthdays is taken care of for another year, can't believe it. Everyone's happy. I know I am. Happy Birthday to me!

Well, you have a lovely day now. I will be back!

♥M