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!
this boy is so obsessed w/tractors! he loves his new tractors from Gran!
yucky shot of me, our family as we were loading up to head home
aunt Lissa and jakey!
"awww, huggh!" as Jake would say
fun grab bags (holes cut in tops of boxes with lots of fun things inside that you can only feel for, not see! love this tradition!
LOVE when he lays on the floor w/his feet like this!
he was using the pillow that keeps the cold drafts of air outside to "hit" people-- it was so cute. He's definitely all boy when it comes to finding anything to play with!
pound--pshhhh!! He loves noises after he pounds it!
too cute not to snap a pic. He'll sit EXACTLY like ____ (insert bigger kid/adult). Soo cute!
my folks!
Matt's top present on his pile was a VS bag...it was cologne =))
Haley and Beaux matching in their gray :) so cute!
"road" table w/M&M's and gumball centerpieces
