Nick’s 2nd Birthday With A Cars Theme

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I can’t believe that it has almost been three weeks since Nick’s second birthday.  For the party we went with a Disney and Pixar’s Cars theme.  Cars are one of Nick’s favorite things, so he loved the theme.  The day itself was a little rough though. Nick hadn’t slept well the night before because of teething, so he was both exhausted and in pain.  Really not a good combination.  To top it off the party was at 1:00, so he had to skip a nap.  He’s at the stage where skipping a nap isn’t always pretty, but it is manageable.  Yeah, on that day the lack of a nap really wasn’t a good thing.

There was so much to do right from the start of the day.  Nick was pretty cranky, but I managed to get a few things done when I could get him distracted.  Mom arrived at 11:00 and we immediately headed out to get balloons for the party.  Nick loves balloons, so he was pretty happy with that outing.

When we got back home we got a little time to work while Nick played with the balloons.  It was a funny site to see him walking around with all seven of them.  We kept joking that he would probably lift off the ground if he had any more.  Sadly the balloon excitement didn’t last.  Nick started to get crazy fussy again. It got so bad that I made Jason take him outside. We managed to get everything done in time, but we really cut it close.

The party itself went pretty well. For food we decided on going with a taco bar and it was quite a hit. Nick decided he wanted to open his presents at the start of the party, so we let him. He didn’t really care about ripping the paper, but he wanted to take everything out of their boxes. For dessert we had a dirt cake. Yep, you read that right. Look for an upcoming blog post where I’ll go into more details on it.

After the party things got rough again. When Nana left you would have thought Nick’s life was over by the way he cried. The combination of extreme exhaustion and teething pain was not pretty. In the end I even had to rock Nick to sleep which is unheard of for him.

Now, onto the details. The start of a well themed party is the invitation. I had found a with a Cars theme that I liked, but none of them seemed like the right one to me. Jason ended up designing ours with Photo Shop, and then we used Picaboo to print them off. Loved Picaboo by the way. This was the first time I used them. The program was so easy and the turn around time was really fast. In fact the invitations arrived days before they were supposed to.

Once it’s party time you have to set the scene. I had really wanted to do more decorating than I had, but Nick’s teething took up all my free, and not free, time. We did the basic birthday party decorations to start with themed plates, napkins, and a table cloth. Then we went a little farther and added a banner and centerpieces. I loved this banner because it allowed you to put up whatever birthday age your little one was turning. The centerpieces we got were cool too because they came with decorative confetti, but they were big confetti pieces and not little ones that just make a mess.

Then I went deeper with the decorations by adding traffic cones that I had purchased from Amazon as well as some of Nick’s Cars toys.  It really is the little things that can add to the overall theme.