Happy 2nd Birthday, Cecilia!

Cecilia turns 2 on January 26, and we celebrated her birthday this past Saturday with family! She had a snowman party, since she has a winter birthday. I came up with the idea to make a snowman cake, and the idea grew from there when I saw snowflake plates and cups at the store. We leave all our snowman decorations out well beyond the Christmas season - because snowmen are for winter, not just for Christmas! - so they added to the "theme."

We invited extended family to celebrate with us. Cecilia's grandparents all came as well as her Aunt Sara and cousin Andrew. Right after Cecilia's nap, we began the party with some snacks and drinks: artichoke dip with crackers, Mexican layered dip with tortilla chips, and some sesame sticks and bunny crackers for the littles.

Here's the hodgepodge assortment of paper products!

Cecilia with Gran

After we had some snacks, Cecilia opened her presents. We didn't have a whole bunch of them since we'd just gotten plenty for Christmas!

Grampa helps her open the first gift - a new water bottle! I am ditching the sippy cups and all their annoying straw pieces that get torn (uh, chewed) up - once and for all! That is, for Caroline and Cecilia. Future children would likely have to start with the straw sippy cups again, because the water bottles aren't easy to manage for very young toddlers.

Cecilia was very impressed with her new water bottle... I didn't think she'd care too much, honestly. She asked for water in it right away (I had already pre-washed it, so I filled it up for her). Then she kept drinking, and drinking, and drinking... and dribbling it all over herself as she practiced sipping with the stronger flow. I asked her a few times, "Would you like to open another present now?" to which she responded, "No. I'm drinking."

Cecilia opened her gift from Gran and Grandad (who had also bought her some new cloth diapers to replace the rags we'd been using, but we didn't wrap those!) - she got a new book and a shirt. In this picture she is holding up the shirt so Gramma can see it and saying, "It's a pants." Hee hee. Gramma and Grampa gave her some new board books.

And here she is tearing into her gift from... well, technically, it is from my grandparents. they sent it when she was born, and we put it away for her until she was old enough to enjoy it. We figured Caroline would just play with it herself if we got it out when Cecilia was a tiny baby, and we ddn't want her to get attached to Cecilia's toy!

It's her very own baby doll! This baby has a beautiful smocked dress and bonnet.

Grampa was given the camera to take photos of Cecilia blowing out her candles... and we found that he'd taken this funny shot! Does anyone have a preschool-aged child who actually likes being photographed??

Cecilia blew out her "2" candle with one big blow! Yay!!

Eating her cake

And here's the snowman after being partially eaten by everyone... kinda sad, huh? I made his eyes, mouth, and buttons with raisins (as you can probably tell from the first picture). For the carrot nose, I came up with the idea to use an apricot fruit leather and cut it into a triangle. Then I had the idea to also use fruit leather to cut out a scarf, so I used a red one for that - strawberry, I think. The arms of the snowman are extra cake... I baked the cake batter in two 9" round pans, and then for the one that became the head of the snowman, I trimmed it smaller. The scraps from that became the arms easily with a little more slicing.

Here are Cecilia and Caroline playing with their cousin. They were so excited that he was coming, and talked a lot about how he was going to hold a chicken, and go in their playhouse... they even set up a tea party for him before he arrived!

Caroline and Cecilia also made these marshmallow snowmen, with help from Gramma the preschool director and Grampa the engineer. Cecilia wanted hers to have a nose... I just used Elmer's glue to put them together, construction paper, and toothpicks. Oh, and their hats have those gross-looking "blackberry" candies on them, because I couldn't find black gumdrops... Caroline later took a bite out of the bottom of the middle one, which I had made as an example!