birthday party pretties

This past weekend we celebrated both Mason and Sophie's birthdays. Mason 14 and Sophie 11. They were born just one day shy of three years apart. That's right June 26th and 27th. I am exhausted from two back to back parties. I thought I would still try to share with you some of our birthday details.
We once again went with a Luau theme, I am a winter baby so how much do I love a summer birthday?  so much!
We placed the chalkboard on the front porch to welcome our guests, this is always an easy touch.

 I decided the dining room was the best place to decorate for the girls parties. I dug out my flag banner I made a while back. It is just triangles of fabric I cut with pinking sheers and sewed into bias tape, talk about easy.

 I picked up streamers which I normally do not do. I think I am a streamer convert though, I loved them .

 We chose a cake design from Pinterest . I tweeked it by adding ground graham cracker crumbs that looked like sand on top. I used a flour sifter to apply the crumbs. The pinterest image had hand done gum paste flowers but I made things easy by picking up faux flowers from the dollar store.

 I once again made dipped marshmallows, ones with sprinkles and one with more graham cracker crumbs, mmmm to smores marshmallows. I got the nice big picks at a dollar store also. Don't you just love dollar stores? you never know what you will find. Like these little dishes were 25 cents each...

 These are jumbo strawberry marshmallow pops.

 We went with three Luau inspired colors for the vanilla cake. I just divided up one box cake batter. I used pure white cake to allow for the best coloring of the batter.

 One healthy option at least , right.

I loved this simple icing style. Just smooth out the icing and then drag a off set spatula around the sides while spinning the cake, so simple and pretty. 

               
I remembered I had a bunch of curtain rings that hadn't fit a rod , I used them to hang the streamers from the chandelier , this made for an easy installation. I just used a stapler to attach the streamers to the walls. Just two little pin holes were left behind.

The one thing about having both birthdays back to back is that I get a nice long break before we have to do this again . At least next year we will have a backyard to enjoy. 

Oh I should mention one of the games I came up with for the younger girls. It was a balloon scavenger hunt. We happen to have a pond across the road from our house so we ( my husband ) filled about 50 or so water balloons and Sophie and I wrote random numbers onto the water balloons. We placed the balloons all around the pond not too far off the path . We gave each child a bucket to gather the balloons with. We sent them off to find as many balloons as they could . Who ever had the largest number won a prize. You could do this game anywhere really , I would suggest outdoors. 

 The day before we did a much more low key gathering for the teen party. One Direction of course.

I found a local bakery that was able to print out a a photo of Mason's favourite boy band. Marshmallow paper , not to yummy , I'm just saying.

She chose a brownie instead of cake , I couldn't complain... I am going to recover from all this birthday madness this week.


They told me landscapers are on site today .... I'm still waiting .I am thinking positively that we will have grass within the nest couple of days, we are ready to water some grass...