Jake's 2nd Bday Party!

The invite - custom made by my good friend Rachel over at www.sweetteapics.com

Sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies and goldfish





favors in the basket, drinks and the cake. Also a couple of pics of Jake from this past year.

Cars ball pit

Colors and transportation coloring pages

A glimpse of the room, with the race track in the back ground

The cake! Half white, half chocolate! Oh, and not ready on time, by the way. 2nd year in a row at two different bakeries for that to happen!

The "race track" that Lissa and Jen worked so hard on. It was totally all over the place a few minutes into the party, the kids pretty much went off-roading I guess you could say. A few families brought some ride-ons to add to the mix after I took this pic, which helped a lot!

Food tables and "jakey is two" banner I made out of cars/travel/transportation scrapbook paper and cardstock

driving play mat!

picture banner, in order of youngest pic to oldest pic

"road" table w/M&M's and gumball centerpieces

Some of his presents just before the party got started

Jake giving sweet baby Tate some love

Tate's big bro Noah...love him!

Matt, Jen, Lissa, Mom, Haley--don't know what we would've done without their help and hard work, along with Gran and Dad!

This lil driver was in heaven!!

Ha! The cones were everywhere!

Friends and Family! The best part of the party!

Cute pic of the ball pit. Hayes, Emily, Ayla and Yuri having a "ball"! Hehehe I'm such a nerd!

Jax, Clint, Lily and Kinley

Family!

blowing out his "2" candle

Papaw and Jake

Our family, including a very messy bday boy!

opening his new toys, which he soon lost interest in after he kept saying, "Open, peasse! Out, peasse!" and getting no response.

This past Saturday we celebrated Jakey's birthday with a few of our closest friends and family. Over 50 people showed up and really helped to make it such a special day for us and for Jake. He had a blast and didn't even want to stop driving around with all of his friends! We held it at the YMCA, and it turned out to be the perfect location! The kids could run around and play but couldn't hurt anything and their parents could keep an eye on them pretty easily. We might have to do another party again there in the future, especially having a winter birthday where you can't plan for the weather at all!

Because his absolute favorite thing to do is drive, and he's obsessed with everything that has wheels and some sort of steering, we decided to do a driving party. This party was such a blast to plan and we came up with some really fun stuff, the kids seemed to really enjoy it and were not happy to leave. =)

A few of our fun and simple ideas included black table cloths with masking tape down the middle to create a "road" look. We came up with a color scheme of stoplight colors of red, green and yellow with a little black, blue and orange thrown in. We used accents of scrapbook paper and made centerpieces and banners of Jake's pictures over the past two years and some words that go along with the theme such as "honk" and "jakey is two". Those were truly fun to make--I will probably be making lots more in the future! I also jumped online and found some plane, truck, car and train coloring templates and printed them out for the kids to color. Super easy and ended up being fun for the kids, too. We also used a huge "car" rug and brought some of Jake's larger toy trains, cars, buses, etc and let some of the littler kids play with those while sitting on the floor.

His cake was simply a round race track with a motorcycle and car hotwheels placed on top. The other food was kept simple with some Paula Deen sugar cookies shaped into stoplights (with red, yellow and green m&m's) and cars, trains and planes, chex mix, different flavored m&m's, goldfish and peanut butter cookies with reese's cups on top. We almost ran out of food this year! We will have more next year, promise! =) I was upset about the food running out, but Jeremy assured me that all of our friends have the means to eat dinner or pick something up on the way home, and that they weren't going to starve that night because we didn't include enough pre-dinner snacks. =) I felt a little bit better after that, but still bummed we didn't do more food. There's always next year! =)

We are so thankful for our family and friends and their willingness to support and love our Jakey. We had a great time celebrating the past two years and are so happy to have these pictures of our fun memories! Thank you to everyone who made his day so special!