For her big THIRD Birthday party, Talia wanted a “making” party. By making she usually means baking, and while we certainly considered a number of messy baking projects (pretzels was high on the list), but we eventually landed on something slightly more reasonable. We used the Helen Oxenbury book “It’s My Birthday” to pull everything together:
In the book a little boy prepares for his birthday celebration with the help of his animal friends, so we started by painting animals to play with (we used a salt dough playdoh recipe to make these in advance):
Then we all sat down to a macaroni and cheese lunch as per the birthday girl’s request:
And then it was time for cake and candles!
… and cupcakes … and cookies …
Since the book is about baking, we decided to compromise and let the kids decorate their own cupcakes. It was a sticky, sugary mess but very popular.
And for our final making project, Talia and her friends made pasta necklaces:
If you are wondering how all of that making got down with 7 toddlers underfoot, we had the help of not only Grandma but also Yeye and Nainai who kept Milo far away from the sugar and pasta:
And for party favors Talia gave each of her guests a copy of “It’s my birthday” (thanks to amazon bargain books):
Five minutes after her guests left Talia and Milo were both fast asleep.
