Party Details

I LOVED planning Robby's party.  And, thanks to Pinterest, it wasn't too difficult to keep all my thoughts in one place!  I knew pretty early on that I wanted to go with a monkey theme since he loves his little Kai Kai so much.  The first thing I found was the invitation package.

I paid one price for all of it and she personalized the invitation as well as the cupcake toppers.  She emailed me the files to download and I printed all that I needed.  I knew I wasn't going to use the cupcake toppers as actual cupcake toppers, so I wanted to think of something fun to do with them.  I saw this idea:

So I cut out big and little circles (I just traced the top and the bottom of a cup to give me uniform big and little circles) from the patterned papers she sent, then used the cupcake toppers with them to make my own version of these.  I just taped all the circles and toppers to ribbon and hung them at different levels of our angled ceiling so it gave the illusion of them being different lengths.  This is how it turned out:

I saw several pins of these cupcakes and just knew that's what we had to do instead of a cake.

In case you can't tell, they are just yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting, then I cut off the top part of a regular size Nilla Wafer for the mouth area of the monkey and cut mini Nilla Wafers in half for the ears.  My mom added the smile, nostrils, and eyes for me because I don't trust myself with decorator icing!  I knew I didn't want to Robby to have to deal with the cookies on top of the cupcake, so for his I just put the candle in it.

The other decoration that I found that I just had to do was the door hanging.  This is the one I saw:

I decided to just use buttons that coordinated with the colors I was using.  I outlined the "1" on some cardboard, cut it out, then hot glued all the big buttons down, followed by the medium buttons and filled in all the empty spaces with the small buttons.  I'm not good at random so I was getting a bit frustrated with the button placement,  But thanks to the encouragement of my sister-in-law, I kept going and eventually got it done.  After I finished with the buttons, I hot glued it to a wide ribbon, glued the "Happy Birthday" card (from the printouts) on the ribbon right above it and taped the ribbon to the inside of the door so it would hang flat on the door.  I am pretty proud of the way it turned out!

I didn't end up doing party favors.  I had a cute "make your own play-doh kit" pinned and will probably use it for his next party.  We'll see!

I had such a great time planning everything and I love how it turned out!  I'm not a crafty person and I usually get very frustrated because things don't turn out absolutely perfect, so I'm surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did.  Robby's sweet little face when he saw all the decorations made it all absolutely worth it!  I know he won't remember this party, other than what he will see in pictures, but the way he looked at all the different decorations with me makes me know that he saw them and enjoyed them during the party!