Milo's birthday bash...

On Friday we celebrated another big birthday in our home! Just last month I posted about our daughter turning one, and this week we celebrated our son's 2nd birthday! (Yes, our children are just 11 months apart!)


We celebrated Milo's birthday with a simple, bright decorations, cupcakes and plenty of homemade vanilla ice cream.


We had an impossible time finding simple party hats that didn't have a character on them, so we ended up purchasing some themed hats and covering them with some cute polka dot paper that we ran off of our bubble jet printer. After they were wrapped in the new paper, we trimmed the edge with scissors and then finished it with a bit of leftover ribbon from Christmas...


For Lola's birthday we made homemade cupcakes from scratch, and they were good... but everyone actually enjoyed Milo's "cheater cupcakes" even more. To make them I prepared a box of chocolate cake mix to the package's instructions with the addition of 2 chocolate pudding cups, baked them off in cupcake cups and then topped them with Betty Crocker's Whipped Frosting in the Whipped Cream flavor. These were some seriously moist little treats...


My birthday boy enjoyed them after our simple birthday supper of Shepherd's Pie topped with cheddar garlic mashed potatoes, rustic Italian bread and Greek salad...

A cupcake party for my cupcake...

We celebrated our baby's 1st birthday yesterday with a cupcake themed party. Pretty darn appropriated, since Lola is a lot like a cupcake. Small, sweet and just girly enough!
When I first decided on the theme I came across this recipe for chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream in Amy's Notebook on the Mom Advice blog. The recipe can be found over on the Farm Chicks blog. They were moist and chocolaty and they were a cinch to whip up.

The birthday girl completely approved...



To decorate the table we found these sweet cupcake gift boxes over at Target and filled them with white gerbera daisies from the grocery store...



We lined three of the arrangements up on the table and instead of setting it the traditional way, we put our knives in one mason jar and our forks in another in the middle of the table and stacked our plates with the napkins interspersed at the end. The silverware placement was more out of necessity than design, since we do have two little silverware thieves in our house, but the overall effect was cute and tidy...



Last, but not least, we embellished our own bibs with cupcakes made from felt. We purchased a package of inexpensive plain bibs and I cut out the design and had my husband sew them on for me. Sorry ladies, he's taken! Aren't they just too sweet for words...