Today marks one month since Darcie’s second birthday, which means that it also marks one month of me not managing to get this post written. I’m going to go ahead and blame pregnancy for my major procrastination there! (The particularly savvy among you will now realise that actually it is one month and four days now, since she turned two – I think that says it all!) Darcie’s birthday conveniently fell on a Saturday so it was easy enough for us to decide to hold her party on the same day. For her first birthday we just invited family but this year it was really nice to have some of her little friends come along too.
We decided to chance it with the weather and plan the party to be outside. Her main present was a playhouse that Dan built for her (from scratch – it’s very impressive!) and so we decided to base the day around that. Darcie’s current obsession is dinosaurs so once we named her playhouse ‘The Dinosaur Lookout’ it made sense to stick with a dinosaur theme. We bought multiple inflatable dinosaurs, (one of which was seven foot and still takes residence in our garden!) and tracked down as many dinosaur decorations and party supplies that we could find. Darcie loves being outside so she already had a lot of outside toys and a lot of what she was given for her birthday were for the garden too. We even had a bouncy castle for her that was the perfect size for her and her toddler pals.
The garden looked amazing on the day for which I’m happy to give all the credit to Dan. Inside we had a buffet containing all of Darcie’s favourite foods and a lot (!) of dinosaur paraphernalia. I loved putting the buffet together knowing that Darcie would be so happy to see all of her favourite foods at once. She’s become quite a fussy eater and so often we fight with her to try different foods, but on her birthday I just wanted her to be happy with the spread. She was thrilled, albeit slightly distracted by all of her favourite people and toys at once!
I made her birthday cake myself from an idea I found on Pinterest. It was a three layer chocolate cake decorated with crushed up biscuits, chocolate and toy dinosaurs to create a little Jurassic scene. I was really happy with how it turned out and it was actually so easy because I didn’t even attempt to make edible dinosaurs. The toy ones I bought are now some of her favourite things to play with so that’s a bonus too.
We had such a lovely afternoon with our family and friends. Darcie really enjoyed herself which I was so pleased about because sometimes she finds situations like that quite overwhelming. She was well and truly spoilt by everyone and it was so lovely to have this special day to be all about her before her baby brother comes along!
Looks amazing!!!