As a girl growing up, I never had my own birthday party. It was always a family dinner with a 9x13 cake and ice cream on a paper plate...yeah, it slipped around like crazy and the ice cream always got my cake soggy! LOL!
As a child, I was always so envious of my friend who were having those magical McDonald's birthday parties. You remember...every child would get a happy meal, a crown, there were balloons everywhere, and if you were lucky...Ronald McDonald showed up with a giant cake of his face on the front! OMG! Those kids were so lucky and those parents were sooooo rich! :)
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| I don't know who this little girl it, but dang was she a lucky one! |
When I turned 23 (before the age of digital cameras, hence no photo), my husband threw me a surprise birthday party...at the local McDonald's play area! He bought everyone a happy meal and even got a McDonald's cake! It was the best birthday party I had ever had due to his extreme thoughtfulness! :) It will always be the best birthday in my mind!
But now, 13 years and 4 children later, "ain't nobody got time for that"! :) With everyone's busy lives and running after their kids, who has time to throw their adult friend a birthday party...and I wanted one, so what's a girl to do? Well throw my own, dang it!
Then I remembered that one of my besties has her birthday just a few days after mine, so we decided to team up. We threw ourselves a birthday party!
First of all we decided to do it at a restaurant with a fantastic outdoor patio. We're not stupid...we didn't want to throw our own party and then have to clean up after it too! LOL!
Then we sent out the infamous Evite and asked everyone, "in lieu of presents", could they pay for their own meal, which ranged from $10-$30. It would be very rude to invite everyone to your party, ask them to pay their way and then pick some place where it's going to cost them $100 to eat. And according to most etiquette experts, it's not rude to ask them to pay for their own meal as long as you tell them beforehand so they can plan accordingly, as well as mention that they don't need to bring gifts. I always like to say "it's your presence, not presents, that's required."
So despite having it at a restaurant, I couldn't resist the urge to decorate a little...and have a theme! My girlfriend and I are both born and raised country girls so we decided to go with a little western theme. Here's what I did.
I decorated each table with some burlap, a mini hay stack, mason jar of daisies, tin can with some "get to know you" questions and some trail mix.
I also decided to make our own cupcakes. Smores it was!
I got this amazing recipe from this blog: Smores Cupcake Recipe . Ya'll, there were 'smack your mama' good! OMG!
Then I purchased the cupcake wrappers from Amazon here: Yellow Chevron Wrappers .
I made the "Wanted" sign myself which makes me laugh every time I see it!
And of course we needed bandanas...so why not decorate with them? I purchased all of them on ebay here: Yellow Bandanas .
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| Me and Leslie, the birthday girls! |
First we forced our friends to come to our party...then we forced them to sing Happy Birthday to us. What? We know what we want! :)
Seriously though, we were surrounded by wonderful friends who support us daily. We couldn't be happier and if it takes us throwing ourselves our own birthday party to get all these wonderful people together, then I have no shame in that! Love them all!
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