The Birthday Party

I finished Lydia's doll late on Friday night. Daddy assembled a swing set for 2 days in the upper 90's while being swarmed by mosquitoes. No pictures of the swing set on my camera, but I will takes some soon.

The color scheme was purple, brown, blue, and green. This was an easy way to decorate. It was supposed to have letters and say Happy 1st Birthday. Maybe next year!

These are the favor boxes we handed out to the guests. Each had a picture of Lydia and some chocolates inside.

I sewed a cute outfit with butterflies on it for Lydia to wear, but I changed her into her swimsuit for the cake eating, so that she could go right into the baby pool to get cleaned up. I managed not to get any pictures of the original outfit, but I am sure someone has some.

I had to bake the cupcakes myself because I wanted them to be dairy-free and safe for Lydia. Duncan Hines makes several mixes and frostings that are OK, but even with that I got really tired of them after the first 30.

I think there were 75 total. Jennifer kept tallying the guest list and making me nervous that we would run out. Each cupcake needed a chocolate butterfly. They were created using the chocolate transfer method I mentioned in an earlier post. Way easier than they look, but also annoying after about 30! In the end there were a few extra so we tossed them into the fruit plate too. Here is Lydia's smush cake before it got smushed.

We had a huge crowd on a very hot day, so most of the crowd stayed inside the house. It was open house style, so people trickled in and out over 4 hours. Huge thanks to Andrea and Jen for handling the food and cleaning while I dealt with Lydia's decision not to nap. PJ killed himself making the lawn look gorgeous AND building the amazing swing set/play area AND setting up baby pools to cool of in. I promise pictures soon, even if I have to re-create them. We had a craft table full of butterfly shapes to decorate, antenna to build and decorate, and butterfly temporary tattoos. We also had large quantities of rum, so lots of grown ups were willing to do silly things like wear antenna and tattoo their foreheads! The perfect day for our Liddybug's Butterfly Birthday!