We got carried away..

Last weekend we had a little party to celebrate Ella’s birthday.

We went with a hot air balloon theme.  In case you couldn’t tell.
In attendance were mostly her loving soccer family, with whom she has spent the better part of her first year.  We have such nice friends, they are so good to me and my babies.  In addition to doing incredibly generous things like providing their home as the venue for our gathering (and helping with the food and décor) they gave my girl tons of love, which she lapped up. We partied hard until very late and even though she missed her nap, she was an absolute trooper and loved all the attention. Our girl digs a party.  She got lots of very fun presents and she is now most fashionably outfitted for spring and summer. Here are a few of the party details, especially  for my mom and my sister who appreciate such things.
This lovely young lady totally saved my procrastinating bacon by willingly and capably helping me to decorate and set everything up. She also had tons of creative ideas and was the artist of this backdrop for our “photo booth”. All in all,  you want this girl in your corner. We love you Jani!

We put up a banner of her monthly photos from birth to age 1. It was cool to see them all in a row. Cool and verklempt-inducing.


We also hung photos of Ellabeth being held by each of our guests all over the house. She has had a lot of cuddle time!

And some of our favourite baby photos of her

The cake.  The ever awesome Tiffany loaned me a huge round cake pan for the “balloon” and the “basket” consisted of cupcakes of course.  Easy and yeah…. kinda sorta looked like what we were going for.

I got the cute coloured baskets from the dollar store and Jani taped pom-pom braid on the balloons to make them more hot-air balloonish (an idea I stole from pinterest)

My awesome friend Carolyn surprised me with this fun balloon wreath! Isn’t it cool? It will adorn our front door for every birthday from now on. If you see it, bring cake.  And a present too. We won’t turn you away.

Ella and her BFF (or so we and her mom are hoping,) Keira. They make such an adorable pair already, doing each other’s hair.   No frenemies here.

Doesn’t Ella look so smitten?

Balloons were definitely the theme…


This gorgeous sunset was unappreciated by all the soccer siblings playing rowdily outside

My poor baby looks like this because after getting super hyped up outside, the rowdy older siblings then came in and in SCREAMED happy birthday at her. You should see the photos of some of their faces. They looked quite menacing in their exuberance. You could tell she was wondering what she had done wrong. Funny and so sad at the same time.  But she is an usually brave little soul and hung in there to blow out her candle (with considerable assistance).

The traditional “finger for your age” birthday shot was fortuitously captured as she pondered the shrieking and went to her happy place.

The amazing Jani then settled in for hours of balloon animal making fun.  She’s a marvel that one. (Did I mention she is great with kids too?)  This is Gracie (we love her too


The favours that we mostly forgot to hand out (as is our way).  There is a story behind these. They were supposed to feature cake-pops decorated to look like balloons. My lovely friend Claire (who makes adorable cake pops look easy), even generously loaned me her cake pop maker and a no fail cake mix to go with it. All went well until I attempted to dip the darn things. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  Naturally, I left this until 2 hours before the party with everything else still to accomplish. Sweet Jani heard some bad words. I was grimly determined to make it work though. After a while, she told me that she thought they looked not unlike the trees in the Lorax and gently suggested that I put the project off until we had got everything else done.  Thank goodness for 14 year olds with common sense.  We ended up going with suckers.
I have a million more photos of the festivities themselves (all of our gorgeous guests in the photo booth!!) but if I start, I won’t stop and there are already too many so I thought I’d keep it mostly technical .  Suffice to say we had a great time and although at various times I had been tempted to keep it to a low key family only affair, I was so glad that we’d marked the occasion with some of the people who have been such a great support to us over the last year. 

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