HAPPY BIRTHDAY PARTY DAY, ALEGRIA!!!

What a busy yet very fun day!!!

This morning I got up early to finish Alegria's birthday cake. Since Alegria loves Elmo so much, that was the decided theme for her birthday party. The cake, of course, would be Elmo! I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but wasn't too sure on how to proceed, so I searched and searched online to see if anyone had attempted a similar cake and I was lucky to find that someone had! She gave me the details on which cake pans to use for the different body parts, so I baked those yesterday and put them together this morning to get a "skeleton" for the cake. Here's what the "skeleton" looked like:

The base is a triple chocolate sheet cake. The body is yellow cake baked in the Wilton doll mold pan. The head is white cake baked in the Wilton sports ball pan. The arms, hands, leg, and feet are all fondant.

Thank goodness Nefilinda had gotten here last night! She got up early this morning to help me by playing with Alegria while I finished up the cake. Thanks, again, Nefilinda! I would never have been able to finish without your help!!! Normally, I would have pulled an all-nighter and finished the cake, but being that I'm 8 months pregnant, I was just too tired to do that with this cake. But thankfully, I got it all done! Here's the end result!

The "water" in the fish bowl is blue jello and "Dorothy," Elmo's goldfish, is a Swedish fish. I wanted to use an orange Juju fish, but I was unable to find a place here that sold those! Oh well! :)

Abilehi showed up after work (she only worked a half-day today), bearing pizzas from Little Caesar's. I had been so busy with Alegria's cake, that I'd forgotten to eat! And Nefilinda hadn't eaten either, she'd only fed Alegria. So we asked Abilehi to pick something up on her way over...we were ever so grateful! Thanks again, Abilehi!!! :)

Finally done eating, we finished decorating for the party.

Here's the kitchen set-up for the craft-making (an Elmo puppet) while we wait for everyone to show up:

Here are the Elmo visors I made to give the kids when we go play outside. We don't want anyone getting a sunburn! :)

Here is the set-up for the game "Fish for Dorothy:"

Here are the Elmo gift bags full of goodies for the kids to take home:

Here's a view of the gift table and the "Pin the Nose on Elmo" game:

That's Alegria's Elmo doll as the centerpiece and a box with Elmo maracas for our goodbye parade at the end of the party!

Materials for our "Fill Dorothy's Fish Bowl" relay race:

And finally, the outside decor:

Once people started showing up, we had them go over to the kitchen to pass the time putting together their Elmo puppets. I used the Paint program on my computer to take a picture of Elmo and dissect him into the head and body and then all of his limbs. Then I blew them up to a large size and printed the different parts on red cardstock. I had bought red brads and had made orange cardstock noses and the eyes out of white cardstock. Abilehi helped me cut all of the pieces out a few nights ago and then today, the guests just had to put it all together to get a cute Elmo puppet!



Alegria showing off her Elmo puppet:

Once most of the guests had arrived, we moved on over to the living room to play "Pin the Nose on Elmo." Everyone did pretty well considering their ages...

...especially Lacey, she got Elmo's nose the closest...

...but Alegria, for some reason, did not get his nose even on his body!

Neither did Sariah! We were all surprised because Alegria and Sariah are the oldest and we thought for sure they would get Elmo's nose the closest to where it should go! Oh well! Maybe because they saw the actual nose already on Elmo, they decided there just needed to be a second sun...!

Next we played "Fish for Dorothy." The children got to use a large net to "fish" and then got to keep the fish they caught! Sariah was the first to go and pretty much just grabbed one and put it in her net! Too funny!

Alegria copied her! :)

Kim and Jace showed up a little late and couldn't stay long, but they were just in time for Jace to try his hand at fishing!

Because the kids would be swimming later, I decided we'd have the cake cutting before that so that we didn't have to cut into their play time. I was so excited about the cake cutting, imagining that Alegria would be so happy with her Elmo cake, especially since she kept excitedly saying "Melmo" (her version of "Elmo") the whole time she saw me decorating her cake this morning...

...unfortunately, such was not the case. I don't know if she realizes that a knife cuts and hurts people, but when she saw we were going to cut her precious friend, Elmo, she went into hysterics! She did NOT want Elmo being hurt! I guess I did too good of a job making him look life-like (in her eyes)!

I was disappointed that I didn't get any pictures of Alegria smiling with her cake. This was the best we could do for a family photo with her cake:

Alegria wanted nothing to do with the knife hurting Elmo, so we didn't even get a picture of her cutting her own cake...Daddy had to do it:

At first, Alegria didn't want any cake, either, but luckily we were able to give her a taste and then she decided she's have some.

Finally a content little girl!

I guess she got curious, too...

Note to self: don't make any character cakes for Alegria anymore...she's too sensitive to her beloved friends getting hurt!!!

Then it was time for everyone to get into their swimsuits for some outdoor water play! A picture of the Birthday Girl before she gets out of her birthday dress that her Aunt Abilehi bought for her...Elmo, of course!

Mostly everyone joined in the fun. Here's Lacey:

However; Alegria was being a little possessive and anti-social. I don't know if the traumatic cake-cutting experience had anything to do with it, but she didn't want to share the water toys she was playing with OR the pool she was playing in...poor Josh only wanted to play!

Luckily, not only did we have two kiddie pools of our own, but we'd also borrowed a couple, so there was plenty for the kids to play with. Here are Lacey and Sariah playing in Alegria's alligator pool:

We also borrowed a slip-n-slide. Josh LOVED that! Here's Big Josh teaching Little Josh how to slide and splash while Jim and Mollie watch from the sidelines:

Quinn, though, is not too fond of pools yet, so Kerri attempted to get him on the swing so that he could enjoy playing outside, too...but he wasn't very thrilled. Maybe because the swing is pink...?

Little Mollie got her feet wet:

Here's Alegria trying to grab every little frog and alligator squirter toy to bring back to "her" pool. Maybe we should have taught her how to place them in a bucket for easier carrying...

Little Tucker is still too tiny for playing in the pools, but he still joined us outside for some socializing. Here's Kerri holding him:

After a while, Alegria finally decided she was ready to play in a pool with some of the others:

After a good while outside, we brought everyone inside for Alegria to open her presents. This year, Alegria did much better at opening the presents all on her own!

Alegria's expressions were so cute as she opened a lot of her presents! I got quite a few videos, but I'll only post two as a small glimpse of these darling expressions:





Daddy helped Alegria open her gifts (don't mind Cameron's clothes! He was the one in charge of all of the pools and water toys, so he got a little wet in the process!), mostly to keep her on task or else she would have gone off after just the first one to start playing with it and probably would not have returned:

Alegria got so many neat toys, clothes, hair clips and bows, and even nail polish from all of her friends! I wish I had remembered to take a picture of her with all of her gifts at the end of the party like we did last year. In any case, thank you to all who came and made her birthday special! We had such a fun time!

After opening all of her presents, we let each child pick out a maraca and played our Elmo goodbye song. No one marched around like I was hoping they would (I guess I should have assigned an adult leader to lead them!), but they all shook their maracas (except Alegria, who was too busy playing with her new toys) and got to keep one to add to their bag of goodies at the end of the party.

Thank you to all who came to Alegria's 2nd birthday party! You made it special and we had such a fun time!

Then...it was clean-up time! Alegria enjoyed putting all of her newly-acquired alphabet magnets on the dishwasher door while we cleaned up.

Thank goodness we had two of my sisters here to help clean up! I was so exhausted by the end of the party, even though it only lasted two hours, exactly like I had planned! And I'm sure glad we had the party when we did, too! Being 8 months pregnant and hosting a party with that many people in attendance (we had about 25 people here in our little house, give or take a few!)...well...that just takes a lot out of you! I don't think I could have pulled it off it it had been closer to Alegria's birthday date!

Well, that was our day! Have a wonderful night! :)