I’ll be honest, after putting a lot of time and effort into Alice’s “ONEderland” first birthday party (shared on Project Nursery here) I really thought we’d be hitting up Chick-fil-A this time around.  But as the time drew closer, I rallied and we had a really sweet, fun-filled day with Alice’s favorite summer treat as the theme – watermelon!

“It’s sweet to be TWO” was easy to plan around and the crisp, juicy watermelon kept things cool for a backyard June birthday party in the South. Plus, it’s a great time of year to find lots of great watermelon-themed supplies.

My favorite element of the party was the dessert table anchored by a hand-painted watercolor backdrop and DIY pennant. The custom cookies and the delicious strawberry ombre cake were pulled off flawlessly by our local bakeries.

MENU: Of course, watermelon was the food of the day. I found some cute engraved popsicle sticks from this Etsy shop to insert into slices of watermelon (beware: it’s not as easy as you’d think to get those sticks in!)  I also found a great recipe for watermelon orzo salad and watermelon salsa which were big hits.

GAMES: To keep our guests entertained my husband helped me build a fun and easy “watermelon toss” game using buckets with color-coordinating corn-hole bags and a giant tic-tac-toe board out of ribbon and tent stakes. We also had a bubble machine and bubble wands, because you can’t go wrong with kids and bubbles!

GUEST BOOK: Alice LOVES to read, so the guest book was a really cute book titled “The Watermelon Seed” where everyone wrote a sweet note for Alice to look back on for years to come.

DIY ELEMENTS: I kept finding pink things and attacking them with a black sharpie to make them look like a watermelon – and it worked surprisingly well! The watermelon party hats required some hot glue, green rick rack and the trusty sharpie to be transformed. Same goes for the dessert table pennant, the balloon “arch” and the precious watermelon slice favors (tutorial here, although I did switch up some of the prizes on the inside with DIY stickers, watermelon candy and a DIY watermelon frisbee).

Special shout-out to my super talented brother, Adam, for juggling Uncle and event photographer for us. We’ll treasure these photos and memories of our sweet day forever!