While planning Alexis’ second birthday party I decided to keep all the elements from Nicole’s first birthday party that were kid favorites (the balloon forest!) and ditch the ones they didn’t care about that just added more stress (decorations.) I even “outsourced” the baking to our local grocery store.

Both the girls birthday’s fall around major holidays – July 4th for Nicole, Thanksgiving for Alexis. A birthday around a major family oriented holiday, and with another one around the corner!, can create a few minor kinks I didn’t anticipate.

The obvious benefit of having a birthday around Thanksgiving is that family is usually still in town that weekend. I suspect that we’ll always celebrate Alexis’ birthday the Saturday after Thanksgiving for this reason. The draw back is that everyone else’s family is also still in town. We figured we’d get a couple food platters at the grocery store while picking up Alexis’ cakes for the adults to snack on. When we arrived at the grocery store they were completely out all prepared food platters, and a long line had already formed waiting for the next batch. We briefly considered waiting, but when they announced the next batch consisted of only nine platters and the gentlemen at the front of the line requested 3 we decided against it. It’s a good thing I had pre ordered the cakes, or we would have really been in a pickle!

The other issue was the party supplies. I went to Party City first, but the per-unit price of Helium tanks had increased $20! Since I needed three that meant an additional $60! They were also nearly completely out of the pearlized balloons that I liked so much. Thankfully I bought too many balloons last time around and still had some on hand. I shopped around locally for a deal for those tanks.

Not to self, plan ahead next time.

I unintentionally made the balloon forest a little higher this time around. I think I also had more trees, but each tree had fewer balloons. It ended up being the perfect height for Nicole to run through, and for Alexis to crawl under. Both kids had a blast. You can’t really go wrong when it comes to kids and a ton of helium balloons.

Posted in Family Life | Tags: Alexis, Birthday