Polar Party

Laura turns two on Sunday.  I'm not sure how that is possible.  But I powered through my disbelief this past Saturday to throw a party for Laura and her friends. 

Since Laura is a winter baby, I wanted to go with a winter theme.  I know there are probably lots of things Laura likes more than polar bears, but I'm not a huge fan of basing children's birthday parties on TV characters.  Besides which, polar bears are cute and snuggly.  So here are a few photos from Laura's party:

[gallery columns="2"]

I found much inspiration for this party from Pinterest.  Not that there were hundreds of boards for children's polar bear parties.  But I did find some really great ideas for snowflake decorations.  I used my Pinterest planning board as a place for recipes, decor inspiration, and party favor ideas.  I also used it to get completely overwhelmed with things I wanted to do, and then to weed out the ridiculous ideas from the more sane.  An igloo made of plastic gallon milk jugs would have been AWESOME.  But it also would have taken up my entire family room. 

I was able to find most of my decoration supplies at the Dollar Store and Michael's.  The table cloth was just a basic plastic cover, to which I added stick-on felt snowflakes ($2 at Michael's).  The wreath on the door was a foam core with Dollar Store blue glitter snowflakes and some extra foam spheres, also from the Dollar Store.  Using the cylindrical foam for cake pop holders was my idea entirely, having seen nothing like it on Pinterest.  I loved how they turned out, and felt the display made the pops look very "Aurora Borealis."

Our two-year-old guests weren't really interested in the "igloo bowling" I came up with, but that's okay.  They had a blast throwing styrofoam cubes and spheres at each other, in less organized fashion.  And this is why I decided that an "ice fishing" activity was completely ridiculous.  I'm glad I stopped myself on that one!

The party favors were bags of "Bear Bites" trail mix that I based off of several Pinterest ideas: two bags of mini teddy grahams, one bag of craisins, and one bag of banana chips.  Tied to each bag of trail mix was a little polar bear stuffed friend that I found completely randomly a week before the party at Ikea - for 50c each.  Total win!  I was really happy with how the favors turned out.  All the children loved their bears, and I hear the trail mix is all the rage among the two-year-old set!

It was a really fun day, even with all the 10pm cooking the night before.  I hope you enjoyed the pictures!