Ethan's 2nd Birthday

Wow, that was tiring!

After many days of preparations, Ethan's 2nd birthday celebration is now over.

So this year's theme was about ABC's. Great job by Lani to come up with the concept. We've been undecided for months on what theme to do coz we wanted to out-do what we did on his first birthday (swimming party). We though of doing a movie party (with big projectors and everything), pajama party (which I though didn't make much sense), and a bouncing party complete with big bouncy castles (because Ethan really loves to jump on the bed, but that setup was too expensive).

Finally about 3 weeks prior, Lani came up with the brilliant ABC idea, which is really fitting because that's
pretty much everything Ethan is interested in.

We made cut outs of letters and numbers that Lani and Ailyn tied up to some straws. We had spell-out cards for most of the stuff in the party like CAKE, CHICKEN, GIFTS, BOOKS, etc, because Ethan looks to go around and read out those words that he sees. We bought a lot of children's activity books (puzzles, colors, reading mats) for our giveaways. And we prepared some Word Search posters for games. Even the cake was ABC-themed.

Then about a week away, for some reason we felt that it wasn't enough. So, we went ahead and rented a bouncing castle. Not as big as we planned for the bouncing theme, but good enough for about 8-10 children at a time.

I also ripped some of the ABC songs from Youtube and played them all through out the party. Ethan really loves them and he's stop whatever he's doing to go near the speaker to sing and dance along.

Happy that everything went well. The giveaways were a blast. The food was sufficient. And the children really enjoyed the bouncing castle, probably as much as the Ate's who snuck up after the kids left. The bouncing thing turned out to be a good idea. The parent seemed to appreciate that we got the kids busy and they can just sit and enjoy the party without having to mind their children too much.

Good job, Mommy and Daddy!

Here are the pictures: