Happy Birthday Tabitha!

Tabitha turned two on the 16th June!  It was a really busy day - we sold an investment property at auction, we'd only been in the new house for a matter of weeks, plus I was very sick, and The Daddy was working that day - but we had a lovely early family dinner, followed by chocolate cake, and I took her to the park with family in the morning.

For her birthday, we bought her a beautiful dolls' house - a 'Mayberry Manor' from the fantastic Le Toy Van company - with pretty wooden shutters, little window boxes and a lift-up roof.  She was every bit as thrilled as we'd hoped, and immediately ran to fetch all her small dolls and small toy animals to play in the house.  We then only saw her bottom and feet for the next hour or so, as she enthusiastically introduced all of her toys to the new house:

Here is a quick snap of Tabitha with her cake - she became quite confused when I got out plates and tried to cut up the cake, saying "No but it's my cake!  It's mine, Mumma!" and I realised that she thought she would get to eat the whole cake!

Not the whole cake, but a very large piece with a nice glass of milk.  She was happy with that!

Two days later, it was my birthday (28) and The Daddy took the day off work to take us all to the Collingwood Children's Farm.  We had an absolutely fantastic time - the weather wasn't great, so the Farm was near deserted, but we rugged up and had fun splashing around in puddles and cuddling all the animals.

A week later, we had a birthday party for Tabitha at home.  I wanted to take it pretty easy, so we went with a 'snowflake' theme (being a winter baby) and The Daddy and I spent the week prior cutting out snowflakes from plain white paper.  It took us much longer than expected, and we ended up spending all our evenings snipping snowflakes, but it was actually quite fun!  I stuck them all over every window in the house.

Work in progress all over the dining table:

Some of the windows - these snowflakes actually looked best at night, with the black outside as a background, and we kept them up for a couple of weeks!

Tabitha wore a beautiful little gold sequined dress from Big by Fiona Scanlan, with a gold hair clip and cute gold ballet flats.  She loved her 'party dress' (would you believe it even came with a champagne-coloured silk slip?!  Too cute!) and I could barely keep her still long enough to take a few pictures!  She ran around with her little friends for three straight hours at the party, and had the time of her life, surrounded by 50 or so of her friends and family:

Smile or grimace from Mumma?!  I nearly killed myself with the party - being on my feet cooking for the few days prior was really quite a crazy endeavour in hindsight, but I'm glad I did it, because she had such a good time at her party.

We had a few tiered plates of chocolate crackles, cupcakes with 'snow' sprinkles, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies: 

I also made plenty of real egg nog with grated nutmeg to tie in withe the winter / snowflake theme, and served it in babycino sized cups.  This was a hit with the children and adults (I made it non-alcoholic):

Knowing my limits, I outsourced the cake.  Tabitha loves a profiterole, so croquembouche was the cake of the day.  Plus, so easy to cut and serve for a crowd!

Mini smoked salmon, cream cheese, caper and red onion bagels were popular - we had the party at brunch time (10am) to work around the nap time of all the toddlers.

Lots of little nibbly bits for the wee people:

We also had fairy bread (with non-dairy spread, this catered for some children with allergies), a few types of sandwiches, some cheese and some nice homemade sausage rolls.

For take-home treats, I baked gingerbreads in the shape of snowflakes (tracking down a snowflake cutter was surprisingly difficult!) and iced them with white royal icing.

I have to say, I'm quite pleased that our new baby is due in late November or so, since it gives me a nice amount of distance between the two birthdays to manage two parties.  Although I know that children's birthdays around Christmas time are often challenging, trying to find a date for a party and manage the celebration in the midst of Christmas preparation.  Plus, both of my parents' birthdays are in mid December - so it's always a busy time in our family!