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Happy 1st Birthday Tabi! Yesterday was her official birthday, and I’m SO happy to say the birthday party is over. This weekend was a crazy one for our family. We celebrated Thanksgiving, Lila’s 3rd birthday at Chuck E Cheese on Friday, Tabi’s First Birthday on Saturday, and then the whole fam got sick with the stomach bug on Sunday. Even lil Tabi! Whew. I want to say that I had the 24 hour bug because I’m pretty much over whatever it is that I caught, but my girls are still under the weather. Hoping they recover quickly so we can enjoy this beautiful weather we’ve been having here lately.
I don’t have any pictures to show (yet) from her birthday party. Though I did want to share my photos + my experience with the Los Angeles Flower Mart. I didn’t have a theme for her birthday party, but I incorporated flowers here and there as part of the decorations. I was on a mission to get a good deal on flowers for centerpieces to spruce up the tables. I drove to downtown LA on Black Friday and the freeways were absolutely CLEAR! I got there in record time!
So for those of you who have never been to the LA Flower Mart and are considering going, it’s not as daunting as it seems. There is plenty of street parking, but it’s by the hour…$3 to be exact. The meters take credit cards, so there is no need to scrounge for coins. If you don’t want to use your CC, they only take quarters! If you are planning on spending more than an hour looking around, you will probably want to park at a lot. For non trade/florists, they open up at 8am. It is $2 admission. It’s highly recommended that you bring some kind of rolling cart if you are planning on buying a lot of flowers. I brought this cart and stuck a Home Depot bucket inside so that right before I was ready to leave, I asked one of the florists to give me some water for my flowers.
I had about 30+ mason jars that I wanted to fill. I had my heart set on peonies because that is my favorite flower! I had them in my wedding bouquet too. Managed to find a pic of my bouquet…ahh memories 
I looked through every florist vendor in the warehouse before actually committing to buy. Many of their prices are the same esp when they are for the popular flowers like roses, daisies, hydrangeas, etc. In addition to peonies, I wanted these small white wildflowers (don’t know the name) and yellow billy-balls. Love how cute they are! The white flowers were not as easy to find. Maybe one out of three vendors had them, and they were sparse. Prices varied, so I made sure to look around to see who had them for the cheapest. As for billy-balls, I only found one vendor that carried them! Can you believe it? Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.
Here are the flowers I’m talking about…
(The pink flowers on the left but in white)
Mellano’s had the biggest selection of flowers, and they were super organized. They kept all their flowers in a separate temperature regulated room which felt like I was in a freezer! Pale pink peonies were 1.71/stem. The small white flowers were 2.75 a whole bunch (yay!). Billy balls were $5 a bunch, and to call it a bunch was exaggerating. I left with $65 worth of flowers, and 50% of them were peonies. Hydrangeas would have been the cheapest and more bang for your buck route because most florists were selling them for $6 a bunch.
Here are some of my flower mart pics~
Honestly, the LA Flower Mart has great deals, and you can’t beat their selection. I’m kinda itching to make a drive out there again before Christmas to decorate my house with Mellano’s fresh wreaths and garlands. I’m hosting my family’s Christmas party this year, and I’m excited to get the house decorated. Not gonna stress about presents this year. All the kids are getting Gap clothes…and I’m doing it all ONLINE!
Anyhoo, can’t wait to show you all pics of the birthday party!
~lil sis
So I’ve been on the hunt to find a tutorial on how to make a PVC Piping Backdrop. I heard it’s fairly simple, and you don’t need any crazy tools to build one. I’ve asked hubby (nicely) to make this for me this weekend even though he caught my nasty cold, so I’m super excited to take some step by step photos as I can’t seem to find a tutorial on the web that includes pictures. So far, I like the one from Wedding Bee.
I keep telling myself it’s worth it to make this backdrop for Tabi’s birthday party. I can always use it for years to come, right?
Wish us luck!
-lil sis
I’ve gone to two kids’ birthday parties in the last two months and I have another one in two weeks. Seems like once you have children, the thing to do is attend birthday parties on the weekends. So now I’m getting the itch to hurry up and get things rolling with Tabi’s First Birthday Party.
I don’t even know where to begin with this party. I thought I had it all planned out in my head, but once I couldn’t get the venue I wanted I kinda just stopped altogether. I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of restaurants now. I realized that finding an open space venue where I have to do all the work with finding linens, a caterer, etc was just way too much work.
All I know is that I’m going to be super minimal when it comes to the decorations. No center pieces since it’s going to be family style. I’ll have a few balloons here and there. I’m going to TRY to make something similar to this -
So pretty! From Geronimo. Order some rice cake, order a cake from Beverly’s Best, get some goody bags…and I’ll BE DONE!
-lil sis
This year my twins turn 5! and while I love themed birthday parties, it is getting quite impossible to have somewhat of a cohesive theme. Afterall, my son is a boy boy and my daughter is a girly girl. I pushed it last year by doing the Star Wars/Minnie Mouse birthday party. This year, I told the kids that I would choose. And after much discussion with lil sis, I decided to jump on the bunting bandwagon. I decided I’m going to “bunt” everything!
Starting with the invites…
I printed up the invites on white cardstock and rounded the corners. The next part was a bit time consuming but I pondered on what would be the best way and this was the only thing I could think of I cut out diamonds in primary colors and folded them in half. The beginning and end triangles are actually tape that I found on sale at Joann’s. So cute! and it worked perfectly in taping down the baker’s twine. Then I glued the folded diamonds with the baker’s twine in between. So easy! and it adds a bit of dimension to it, which I’m very pleased with.
I thought about making a bunting for the party room out of tissue paper much like I did the invites, but really, at 5 months pregnant…do I really need to go above and beyond? So lil sis convinced me to do a smaller bunting for the dessert table. Can you guess what I’ll be doing this weekend???
big sis
One more week till Hello Kitty craziness! Lila’s birthday party is around the corner, and I’m feeling so overwhelmed because I haven’t even thought about the final details since the magazine has come out. Orders have been coming in (which is AWESOME, don’t get me wrong), but I haven’t had a chance to think about anything else!
I’m almost done with her birthday banner. I decided to make a red and pink one and make it a bit different by cutting out the actual letters. I already stuck it on my wall to see what it would look like. I’m going to be lazy and keep it up till her party. No use in taking it down when I have to put it back up in 6 days, right? Ugh. I told myself just a few balloons, a banner, and that’s it. I’ll post a picture of it later this week. I want to adorn it with tiny, tiny tissue pom poms. HA! I thought I was over tissue pom poms, but seriously they’re so easy to make and they look even cuter when they’re the mini version.
The hubs thinks I’m one crazy person because I’m throwing our daughter a birthday party while I’m 36 weeks preg. I told him to hush…that I was feeling fine. However, this past week has been HORRIBLE. I’ve been getting this shooting pain around my butt area everytime I stand up or lean towards the right side of my body. I didn’t get this with my first pregnancy. Google says the baby might be pressing down on my sciatic nerve. It’s been getting progressively worse. I’m just hoping that I’ll be able to deal with it the next few weeks. I’m to the point where I let out a lil scream when I stand up. My daughter looks at me and says “Aya?” and pats my bum. Aya is her word for Ouch! She can be so sweet and such a menace at the same time
I’ll leave ya with this last pic. This is the last and final item that’s going into the girls’ goody bags, which I’ll post a pic of later this week too.
ahhh makes me smile!
-lil sis
I completely lost track of time and lil sis reminded me a few weeks ago that I am running out of time and must send the twin’s birthday party invitations! Now, I know what etiquette says about when to send out wedding invitations, baby shower and bridal shower invitations but what is appropriate for your average kid’s b-day party??? I ended up giving 3 weeks…I figure it’s probably a tad bit too much time but better to be early than late, I say.
So the theme. Minnie Mouse and Star Wars. ??? WHAT?! How? Is it possible to combine the two forces? It’s all too strange. I got lucky b/c we are again having it elsewhere so I do not need to worry about prepping for games, pinatas, major decorations. phew!
First step: the invitations. I made TWO different invitations…Minnie went to the girls and Darth Vader went to the boys, for obvious reasons. Who cares if they have the same set of friends Unfortunately, this led to alot of confusion amongst the parents.
“Are they not having a joint party?”
“Why aren’t you celebrating it together?”
“Are you having 2 parties?”
sigh…
Here are the their invitations. I could have done a simple, cute flat card but I’m ol’ school and still piecing together paper, scrapbook style. There are a few people on Ebay and Etsy doing this card; it can be a bit time consuming if you are making a bunch but completely doable if you only have to make 10 (my own limit). I started with a template.
I purchased black 6 x 6 square envelopes and enlarged Minnie’s head until it fit snugly into the envelope. Then the hard part. You could trace the template onto your black cardstock with a white pencil but I didn’t want to deal with having to cut PERFECTLY and/or erasing anything so I scored it…with a chopstick! like so…
(we’ll get to this image in a bit) Excuse the popping veins; you really have to press hard to get the lines to show on black paper
I found a Minnie/Mickey font and also sized the wording so that it would fit perfectly in the center of her head.
Next? the fun part. Accessorizing her! Machine sewed up a bunch of tiny bows and then hand sewed the bows in the center.
So cute!
I had a very hard time with the whole Star Wars theme. Yes, again could have done a simple, flat card but I wanted to keep it consistent with my daughter’s invites so I found an image online (as shown above) and blew it up so that it too would fit snugly in the 6 x 6 envelope. Same for the wording…adjust the size, print, cut out the shape, and then glue them on to the cardstock.
Here’s where the problem lies for these invites. The color combo. Sure, they matched Minnie’s but they probably would have looked much better if the inner paper was a dark grey. Little do I know…I could NOT get anything to show up on the dark grey paper! I panicked, researched, and learned something about ink and your printer and yada, yada, yada. Had some vellum leftover from previous invites and ended up using those. They look a bit “skeletor” in my opinion but I had to work with what I have.
Next up…the birthday banner, the party favors, oh and I’m going to attempt to make something I have seriously been ooo-ing and ahh-ing about and I cannot believe I didn’t know about her and her thingies. All to come…
big sis
p.s., these pictures were taken with my old camera
Update: the template is finally up here! Yay!
There are so many exciting things to celebrate this year! Big sis’ twins are turning 4, my good friend is having a boy, another good friend is having a baby, my other good friend is getting married this fall, and my lil one is turning 2! So many events to look forward to! I can’t wait!
I get sidetracked so easily, and I started looking into baby shower decorations which led to birthday decorations. You know, November isn’t very far away! I’m joking, but I did spend the last hour reading misc blogs about the cutest party themes and decorations.
What I found and maybe can incorporate into a future 2nd birthday party or shower:
I’ve seen the tissue pom-poms used in many parties, so maybe these honeycomb balls can be the “next” popular decoration. Martha Stewart also has a tute on this here.
{via Jessica Claire Photography}
Wow, a lot of thought went into that Alice in Wonderland birthday party! I wish I could have been invited to have tea with those gals! I don’t think a two year old could appreciate something like this 
My fave! Can you believe that’s a Hello Kitty pinata? So adorable! Lila is in love with her HK collection of goodies. I can just imagine her going gaga over all of this cuteness.
Anyhow, that’s enough for now. Have a great week everyone!
-lil sis
So I have been on the search for the perfect crowns for my twins…to wear during their birthday parties. I came across Mommy Blessings Crown Tutorials Galore post and opted to create Juicy Bits’ crowns. I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out how to design my twins’ crowns…do I include the number 3 (how old they will be)? initials? logos? And b/c I just got back from vacation and wasn’t feeling overambitious, I kept it simple. My son’s took a lil longer b/c of the batman logo but I managed to complete them in 2 evenings. I definitely agree with Jessica in using a heavyweight interface. Her tuturial is super easy to follow and both my daughter and son were excited to wear their crowns!
my daughter requested for green? all of a sudden, her fav color is no longer pink but green???
my son also wanted green so it works out perfectly. They can still match but not be so matchy matchy (I am not a mommy of twins who feels the need for everything to match).
So after all that hemming and hawing about the kids’ birthday party…I am having 3 parties for them! I go from one extreme to another. ugh! I have some serious problems. To make my life more complicated…do I make the favors or shall I just buy?
big sis
