Under Construction

Fishing Theme Birthday Party Invitations

 

Every year I seem to remember anew that I really like planning theme birthday parties. Just like my mom except with more emphasis on the cake and food and less pre-planning and organization. This year the boys-of-the-family birthday party theme is....fishing. The invitation idea is 100% stolen from Pinterest with the addition of some inappropriate puns by Mr. H and I. The party is this weekend and, honestly, the invites are the only thing done. And these week is crazy busy with baseball (two games for Oscar) and band (Biscuit performing at a minor league baseball game) and celebrations (new house for the in laws, birthday for a friends). So, yeah. Who knows when the rest of the party planning will happen! And it doesn't help that I uncovered a love for Swedish Fish and have just now polished off the entire bag that was purchased specifically for party/cake decor. Oops.

Notes on the invite. The vest is a paper grocery bag with the printed invite covering the grocery store logo. The fish were cut out of an old science book. The hook is a bent piece of wire (but a cut paper clip would have worked great) with a snipped off bit of a feather tied on with thread. I should have cut the neck of the vest higher as the text ended up showing so I had to add the green paper which doesn't look as good as I'd hoped. It was good it's just a family party because 6 was just about as many of these as I could handle making. Oscar's friend party was an evite.

Blurry photo so, the fish themed wording in case you can't read it:

Hope we can LURE you over for a REEL good time. 

Our CAST of characters.

THE FISH WILL BE BITING around 4

Bring your BASS on over just for the HALIBUT (probably not appropriate for a 7 year old but oh well)

If you'll TAKE THE BAIT, please RSVP...

Lego birthday party for the boys (plus extra celebrations for Mr. 6)

We've got a bit of a tradition going that the boys on my side of the family (well, at least my husband, father and son) get a themed joint birthday party celebration in during their mutual birthday week. Hard to believe this is party number SIX! (Links to party one, two, three, four, and five)

I forgot to blog it at the time (in early June!) but figured better late than never. As usual, I had fun with the details on this party. Just google "Lego party" and ALL the ideas come up. I stole several ideas.

I guess I forgot to take a photo of the legos in the bathroom soap dispenser filled with clear hand soap. They're actually still in there :)

*what happens to a family photo when there are too many cameras

In addition to gifts and cake and food we spent some quality time applying metallic temporary tattoos from the dollar store. Those were a hit. 

And as if the family bash wasn't enough, Oscar had a friend party thanks to my mom who bought a birthday package at a local gymnastics place at the school auction. Shout out to Tricks Gymnastics-they were fantastic to work with. I personalized the party just a teeny bit by making balloon animals.

AND because two big parties isn't enough, Oscar had a very low key little recognition on his actual birthday when we were camping at Lake Tahoe with his cousins who couldn't come to his main party. So of course another cake made perfect sense ;)

 

 

 

Picnic Day 2017

Another year, another Picnic Day. I continue to love it. Mr. H continues to not be a fan and not attend but he was happy this year because I brought home seven grapevines for our new vineyard. The Department of Viticulture and Enology gives away vines every Picnic Day so our entire family waited in line and got vines which are planted and thriving in the front yard.

It was so fun to have my two-year-old niece at Picnic Day this year. Of course I didn't get any photos but she was there along with my sister, brother-in-law, mom and dad. The weather was perfect and it was a lovely day.

We continued our random tradition of going to the fire station at lunchtime and seeing the medivac helicopter take off. We started what may be a new tradition of participating in art at the new Shrem Museum. We missed the farm animals (my niece saw them) but hit up the entomology exhibit hard and I was surprised how long Oscar spent looking at bugs, dead and alive. We also saw an amazing display featuring live bats and a volunteer feeding them mealworms with tweezers! The day always ends with Battle of the (Marching) Bands which is so fun but less so when everyone is worn out so we cut it short and headed home knowing that there will be another Picnic Day in 2018.

Oh look, here's a photo from Picnic Day 2007! What a difference a decade makes.

Holiday baking 2016

Following news (politics) has completely taken over my brain in a way that is no longer helpful. I hop online and instead of doing something productive (finding a recipe to cook for dinner) or even something innocuous (looking at quilts on Instagram) I am clicking through to Twitter and following the disaster that is our current political situation. And thinking that maybe nobody else is but owners of Twitter stock must be LOVING our president elect.

ANYWAY after a long posting hiatus I didn't want to come back to this place and complain. I wanted to record (somewhere I can find it) the menu from our December baking and holiday party. Yes, it's several weeks late but that won't matter in December 2017 when we're all looking for links to solid recipes to make and share.

The annual holiday party has fallen in a bit of a rut: many cookies, two soups (one is always Hungarian Mushroom), raw veggie platter, cheese and crackers and some other stuff brought by family/friends.

This year I switched out the raw veggies for roasted veggies with this Labne dip and it was amazing. Yes, I was roasting veggies as guests arrived but they were good warm or at room temp. Speaking of veggies, I roasted: carrots, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, sweet potato, delicata squash, turnips, broccolini, green beans and probably something else. I tossed each veggie in a big bowl with olive oil and a bunch of kosher salt and roasted at about 400 until they looked done. Each veg cooked a different amount of time so I just had trays going in and out over an hour or so. It was awesome! I ate leftovers for days and couldn't have been happier.

For the non-Hungarian Mushroom Soup we switched to tri tip sandwiches. I seasoned many pounds of tri tip with Badia Complet seasoning (from Costa Rica!) and grilled them Friday. For the party we sliced them cold then re-heated the slices, covered, in the oven. We served with Kings Hawaiian rolls and cheese, mustard and horseradish sauce. Yum!

Sweet stuff:

• Toffee (best thing served, hands down) (sidebar: I met the man who co founded Brandini and totally went on and on about loving his recipe. I think he thought I was weird and in hindsight, how annoying because I've never BOUGHT his toffee and I met him at a sales event. Despite that he seemed nice)
• Peppermint bark
• chocolate chip cookies
• Ginger cookies
• Coconut cookies
• Buckeyes (Mr. H's favorite, I know the recipe was from Smile and Wave but I can't find it)
• Toffee almonds

In addition to the soup and sandwiches I did cheese and crackers (basically didn't get touched), spiced, roasted nuts and likely something I'm forgetting. Really, it was all about the veggies and tri tip.

Mr. H made Irish cream which is always a good idea.

Everyone showed up and it was a lovely time. So lovely I didn't take any photos so here is a photo from sugar cookie making. Oh, we also had sugar cookies for the kids to decorate. 

 

And here is the mess from the sugar cookie making.

Hope your Christmas was great (if you celebrate) and your New Year off to a good start despite the always depressing news.

And if you are at all interested in politics I'd recommend the Pantsuit Politics podcast for a thoughtful, balanced perspective. 

 

Orange you glad it's October?

Can you tell the birthday party theme? We do a joint birthday party in the Spring for the boys so this Fall we started a joint party for the fall babies: Biscuit (11), my mom and my brother-in-law. I couldn't come up with a theme so I went with a color. If you're planning an Orange theme party October is the time to do it--orange is everywhere and there are plenty of orange foods available.

In addition to the fruit (cantaloupe, persimmon, tangerine, mango and canned peach) and vegetable (carrots, orange peppers, orange cauliflower and orange cherry tomatoes) we served orange cheeses and orange snack foods (cheezits and some sort of snack mix). The main dish was butternut squash soup (so good!), grilled cheese and orange chicken straight from Panda Express.

Finally, dessert was cake three ways. An ice cream sandwich cake inspired by this but not following those directions. The cake was the chocolate cake filled with Biscuit's homemade vanilla ice cream. My mom had the most delicious chocolate peanut butter cake ever. Biscuit had carrot cake. Because you have to have carrot cake for an orange party!

The only game was an orange peeling contest and watching my niece chase the cat around. Let's be honest, the party was mostly about eating (with a side of presents). It's so fun to think about these joint parties and do the decor and make the food. I'm pretty sure birthday cakes are my love language.

Oh, and that great polka dot paper I put on the table and wrapped around the lampshade is from the dollar store. And all those orange veggies in the centerpiece were fun to buy. We grew the pumpkins! And that centerpiece is moving nicely into fall.

 

Science themed birthday party--the food

So, the food isn't as exciting as the decorations but I'm writing this post because I was very excited about melon molecules and DNA pasta salad.

In perusing party ideas for science birthdays I saw something about molecular models with gumdrops. But we used melon balls and cherries. I was just making good old H20 but Mr. H got involved and we had N2, methane and all sorts of stuff. With the proper number of bonds, of course.

The salad was the recipe (with almonds rather than pine nuts but otherwise as written). I used the double twisted gemelli pasta. Though I didn't confirm if it was twisting the proper direction. I can confirm the salad was tasty!

The cake was going to be a solar system or an atom. Oscar strongly preferred atom. Mr. H just wanted ice cream cake, same as last year. This year I used purchased ice cream and oreo cookies and just DIY'd the fudge sauce. I'd argue it was better than last year! I had grand plans of creating electron orbit paths out of licorice but, in the end, scattered the "electrons" around the "nucleus" (made up of chocolate protons and vanilla neutrons, of course) and we dug in. Easy peasy.

The rest of the food was standard party fare: veggie tray, fruit, chips, deviled eggs (thanks, mom!), hamburgers and a green salad. A theme doesn't work for everything but everyone likes onion dip.

Oh, and we did serve the drinks out of (food safe) beakers. So that was fun!

We were really full by the end of all this ;)

 

Science themed birthday party--the decorations

This could also be called "the party we pulled off in about 24 hours".  A triple birthday party with a Science theme.

After sending the invitations well in advance I did exactly nothing beyond confirming cake preference for two of the three birthday boys (sorry, dad) and food preference for one of the three (sorry, Mr. H and Oscar). I did have a few general ideas but basically Biscuit and I brainstormed on the way home from San Francisco. We got home in the midafternoon Saturday, Mr. H had already done the shopping and we got right to work. By Sunday at noon we had a party.

Fortunately Mr. H teaches chemistry and I'd had the foresight to ask him to bring home labware for decorations. Perfect for the classic experiment showing how plants take up water (and food coloring). The white carnations, mums and hydrangeas were great.

Inspired by Jennifer, I decided to carve a linoleum block and print tea towels as favors. I had planned to use them as napkins and send them home as favors but I didn't leave time for the ink to dry. Oh well--still good favors and who needs napkins anyway? I figured helium is the most festive element (balloons!) and "He" is perfect for a party celebrating all male birthdays.

Then, of course, I realized I should have printed t-shirts! Since there wasn't time for block printing ink to dry I tried screen printing ink. And no, it doesn't work well for block printing but five-year-olds aren't that picky.

We have a pretty solid tradition of a door decoration and this year's may have been my favorite yet. Let's "CELL" ebrate! Biscuit totally led this project with minimal help from me and Oscar. I did cut out that rough endoplasmic reticulum and a few other organelles but she did a ton and was awesome about letting Oscar help cut out the nucleus.

The planetarium show at the Academy of Sciences totally got me thinking about table cloths. I had all sorts of complicated ideas but at midnight I came up with a super simple plan: black fabric, unhemmed, online constellation chart, white chalk. 10 minutes and done. And I can wash and reuse the fabric!

The house wasn't entirely clean and clearly, the tablecloth wasn't perfectly ironed but these decorations were super fun to make. I love this part of a party.

Birthday boys' invitation

It has become tradition to host a triple party for my dad, my husband and my son whose birthdays all fall the same week at the end of May/beginning of June. And, because I am practically the same person as my mom, it has become tradition for these parties to have a theme.

This year's theme....Science! I tried to switch to bicycles but Oscar would have none of it so we're sticking with Science.

The invitations have been mailed. In case someone couldn't crack the numeric code on the front, here's a hint: iron the back of the card to reveal the date and time written in invisible ink. This is probably super annoying but I had fun!

I've already got pipet "straws" and a few Erlenmeyer flasks so really, all that remains, is deciding whether the cake should be a model of an atom or a solar system.

Here is where I found the cool (free) website to make the periodic table words.

And I did some invisible ink tests. Lemon juice works better than milk milk. And though the website said acid was the active ingredient vinegar does not work at all. I used a q-tip to write with lemon juice, let it dry and mailed it. Both ironing and holding over a candle worked to reveal the words.

 

Tassels (and wrapping paper) and cake

Between friends and family we have three birthdays this week (including mine!). So, for the third week of #52crafts, I decided on cake decorating. This cute tassel decor from Creativebug looked simple enough.

The cake is Smitten Kitchen (of course). It is good and the frosting is not too sour at all. The decorations are ginger crisp cookies cut out with cutters from Ikea. Candles by Oscar :)

And since I had a few spare minutes I painted gift wrap inspired by this Creativebug class. I used paper grocery bags and black paint because the gift inside was black shoe polish. Doesn't every 13 year old want black shoe polish? They do if they're in Civil Air Patrol and really conscientious about polished shoes.

I was a total skeptic about online video craft instruction but I'm finding it really fun to scroll through the various classes at Creativebug and just try stuff. Makes for fun (creative) Fridays.

Our Christmas card--2015

This is a project that came out exactly like I imagined. Well, after about 20 tries at painting the "snow" globe outline and Feliz Navidad text. That took a lot of redos! Once I had one I was happy enough with I used Adobe Shape to turn the text into a vector image so I could layer in the photo of the kids on the beach in Costa Rica and print it all as one image.

The "glass" is cut from a regular sheet protector. The hardest part was adhering the plastic over the image but I finally realized the little glue/tape rollers that you can buy in the scrapbooking section worked perfect.

Everyone thought I brought back the sand from Costa Rica. That would have been cool. But no. Stole it from the sandbox at the park down the street.

I took a video of the sand shaking around but it didn't come out so you'll have to take my word for it. The sand does shake around.

Feliz Navidad. One month and three days late. Also known as the day I should be saying happy birthday to my sister.

Happy Birthday, Laura.