Melissa@FOB

Our Little McKenzie turned 5 and really wanted a Dinosaur Birthday Party, so of course I do what I do best and go to Pinterest for ideas. Since she’s not really an All Pink Everything kind of little girl, I went with the more realistic Jurassic look for the decor and through in a pop of Pink in the cookies and paper plates.  I then created a backdrop using a thick poster board covered with Moss from Michaels. I used Palm Leaves to frame it and other artificial plants I had sitting around the house. I purchased wooden letters that spelled our “Roar” from Hobby Lobby and hung them using twine to set the stage for the rest of the cake table.
She was amazed when she walked in with her class and could not stop talking about it the rest of the week! It’s moments like these that make me step back for a minute and appreciate how much fun mom’ing can be! Happy Birthday To Our Precious Girl!

On September 11th, our lil man turned two and although I had a grand plan for his party, the weather had a different plan as Hurricane Irma headed in our direction. We live in South Georgia so we didn’t exactly get the worst of the storm but enough to do a a little bit of damage. Knowing the storm was heading our way, I decided to put together a quick last minute “Just Family” dinner and cake celebration for him since it was his birthday and all.

Thankfully I ordered letter balloons spelling out his name ahead of time and a few days prior I began looking around the house to find a way to make what we had laying around work as decoration.  I came up with the idea of a little modern Cactus/fiesta theme using the mini succulent plants I had more than I remembered scattered around and was able to get him a quick cactus tank shipped on time too. I then made a quick call to our local cookie master with my fingers crossed that she would be able to throw together a dozen cactus theme cookies. To my surprise she did and they were ready right on time. I purchased a pre-made vanilla cake from our Publix bakery, hung up Haines’s name in balloons and set up a little table using succulents that I put inside a few cactus glasses from the Dollar Store i purchased a year ago but never ended up using, along with a birthday cake and cookies for display.

Viola, our Pre-Hurricane Birthday Party went off without a hitch! You would have never known that we had a pretty scary storm scheduled to touch down the next day.

MY ADVICE: If you are on a tight budget or a tight time schedule to celebrate your little one. Look around your own house for decorations, Your own style might just inspire you to come up with an awesome way to make your little’s birthday something to remember! :D

When it came time to plan our baby boy’s 1st birthday, my husband and I thought of having a small and simple picnic birthday breakfast at our nearby wetlands center. Of course, I had to take it a step further (more like 200 steps further) and throw a theme onto this wonderful picnic idea. Since his nursery design is an “outdoor” theme, I wanted to create a picnic party in keeping with that and set a stage that resembles the space he loves most – His Room!
While browsing and researching “Lumberjacks”, I ran into an old vintage photo of real Lumberjacks having breakfast at a “Logging Camp”. I thought how perfect would that be to re-create a similar scene! So my handy dandy husband made a beautiful toddler harvest table out of old pallet wood we had laying around, stained and sealed it and before you know it our “Logging Camp” breakfast was born!
The Food Buffet consisted of yummy breakfast items and a few treats for the kiddos. We had breakfast Sausage “TIMBER LOGS”, fresh mixed berries “BERRY PICKING”, mini pancakes with maple syrup “FLAP JACKS” w/ “TREE SAP” & Graduates lil crunchies “CAMPFIRE FLAMES”. We washed everything down with either apple juice “RIVER WATER” or chocolate milk “MUDDY PUDDLE”. In keeping with our outdoor Logging/Lumberjack theme, I called upon Marcia from the amazing custom cookie shop here in town, Yaya’s Sweets & Treats to create these adorable cookies that represented The Great Outdoors!  These were so beautifully done, I was hesitant to let anyone touch them, much less eat them.
The Cake I made the night before. I found cakes that look like tree stumps on Pinterest and thought what an awesome touch that would be to our party in the woods. So I melted caramel candies to ice the top of the cake and melted then refrigerated chocolate melts, broke them apart and used them as the outer shell of the cake to resemble bark. I used a toy moose and trees I found at Michaels as toppers.
I found a few clipart images online, printed them out and glued them to wooden dowels to create last minute photo booth props. Even though we didn’t necessarily have a “Photo Booth”, we had fun posing with the different silhouettes.
His birthday gift from my husband and I was the adorable felt campfire set from the wonderful Shop, Three Wee Monkeys on Etsy.
We had such a wonderful morning celebrating our baby boy! Its moments like this that just make me want to hold my family even tighter, as I feel so blessed to be apart of this little tribe and look forward to more memorable moments ahead!

This is our son’s Haines’s Alaska-Inspired Nursery. Complete with details that highlight the great state as well as a few DIY touches that my husband and I worked on to help realize our vision of a cozy cottage in the mountains.

I wanted to do a small little quaint celebration for our first baby McKenzie becoming a big sister. I wanted her to know that even though she will be sharing our time and attention with her baby brother, she is and always will be so special to us. I didn’t want to go over the top with this,however, I found that a few party supplies and a yummy breakfast would do the trick! I packed napkins and paper plates, along with Kenzie’s gift already wrapped. The morning our baby boy was born, I had my husband set everything up on the windowsill in our room. I made the banner out of napkins and left over wrapping paper. Daddy picked up a half dozen sprinkled Glazed Donuts and a couple bottles of Chocolate Milk and we were all set!

Our backyard peach and grey pumpkin birthday party celebrating our little pumpkin turning two!