I have a love/hate relationship with throwing birthday parties for my kids. On the one hand, I usually host them at our house, and feel like everything has to be sparkling clean in order to be acceptable. Obviously, the junk drawer (everyone has one of those, right?!) and our closets have to be 100% organized before people come over. I mean, what if someone randomly needs a paper clip or gets chilly (in the middle of summer in Florida…) and needs to borrow a sweater? Hey, it could happen.
I’ve always been a crazy lady in the week or so leading up to any sort of event at our house, making sure everything is in it’s place, every speck of dust is gone, and every window is squeaky clean. That’s my biggest gripe about throwing birthday parties, but also, it’s just a lot of work planning the party itself.
For me, it starts out months in advance, getting both kids to agree on a theme (the girls’ birthdays are only a couple weeks apart and so far, we’ve done joint parties), which is pretty close to impossible. Then, I’m that mom…I can’t ever seem to find the perfect invitation, so I end up designing them myself on Photoshop. Next is deciding on the guest list, food, decor, cake, games, party favors…that list is never ending. In the week leading up to the party, there are at least 57 trips to the store, even though I swear every single time I’ve gotten every last thing we need. Throw in a few hours for the actual party, then we get back to work cleaning up the mess that 20+ kids just made running around our house. Fun!
But actually, believe it or not, despite all that…I think I love throwing my girls parties more than I hate it. They always have so much fun and the happiness on their faces always makes it 100% worth every minute and dollar spent.
One of my favorite parties we’ve thrown for the girls was Dr. Suess themed and I loved the end result!
Invitations
The invitations, I made on Photoshop. I searched Google and Pinterest, and combined and reworked several of my favorites to create one that worked for us.
Food
I always try to make the food work with the theme of the party. Again, Pinterest came to my rescue. We served party subs as the main course and mostly other snack-y foods.
- Build Your Own Suess Salads– lettuce and a bunch of toppings for everyone to make their own
- Poodle’s Noodles– pasta salad
- Green Eggs and Ham– rolled up deli ham and deviled eggs with dyed green filling
- Cat’s Hats– skewers of grape tomatoes and chunks of string cheese
- Truffula Fruit Kabobs– rainbow fruit skewers with strawberries, cantaloupe, green grapes, blueberries, and red grapes
- One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish– Goldfish crackers (we found red, white, and blue 4th of July themed ones, which worked perfectly!)
- Hop on Pop(corn)– plain ol’ popcorn
Other
We did have too many decorations. We used Dr. Suess books everywhere as the majority of our decorations, and used red, white, and blue as our main colors.
We made a “sweets” table with treat bags for everyone to take some home with them. The treats table included Nutter Butters (Loraxes), Rolo Pretzel Turtles (Yertle’s Turtles), M&Ms (Truffula Seeds), Swedish Fish/Gummy Sharks (One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish), Orange Slices (in a glass jar, decorated with a Lorax face), Twizzlers, and gum balls.
In lieu of a cake, we had mini cupcakes. I printed off small Dr. Suess related pictures and made them into cupcake toppers by gluing a toothpick in between two of them.
This party was a super simple one to bring together, especially since decoration-wise, we used mostly books we already had and red, white, and blue colored decorations. But I loved the way it came together and we got so many compliments on it! Stay tuned in a couple weeks to see what the girls’ birthday party will be this year!