Me Want Cookie! {the party details}

Harrison began showing a pretty big interest in Sesame Street over the summer. One of his favorite stuffed animals is a singing Cookie Monster that he got for his birthday last year. It is dressed like a farmer and sings Cookie Monster had a farm, E-I-E-I-O! over and over. And over. And over. When it came time to decide on a party theme, I reluctantly decided to base it on his beloved Cookie Monster, or "Yi-Yi-Yo" as Harrison calls him (thanks to the not-at-all annoying song his toy sings. Over and over, in case you missed that.). Licensed character themes aren't really my style and I was afraid of it becoming too cheesy, but then I got the idea to do a Cookie Monster-inspired cookies & milk party and then I got pretty darn excited. Especially for somebody who isn't terribly fond of cookies or milk. (But The Hubster? He requested the same party for himself next summer. Ha!) There are so many great ideas out there on Pinterest and so I got to work planning.

Here is the invitation. I ordered it from Etsy here. Like I said, I wanted to incorporate Cookie Monster but didn't want his face plastered everywhere. I was really happy with the way these turned out.

Here is a picture of the shirt I made for the birthday boy. This was right before his name was monogrammed on...I apparently didn't take a picture of the finished product until he was wearing it. I saw a lot of cute t-shirts on Etsy that I didn't have the budget for, so I decided to create one myself. Including monogramming, I made this for under $10. Not too shabby considering monogramming was $7. :)

Now onto the decorations! First up is the birthday wreath. Or approximately 45,349 cookies hot glued in two layers onto a poster board I cut into the number 2. That figure might be slightly exaggerated, but it sure felt like it when I was gluing them on. It actually only took about 1 1/2 boxes of Cookie Crisp and probably 3 hours of labor, but I was definitely kicking myself for making that 2 so darn big! I am possibly a little anal retentive and wasted a far too much time obsessing over the lack of consistency when it comes to the placement of the teeny tiny chocolate chips on the teeny tiny cookies, but that is definitely beside the point.

Here is the banner I made with my cricut. I just took brown houndstooth scrapbook paper and glued on the blue cardstock letters I cut out. It's double sided and this year I actually glued the letters on right -- last year was an epic fail as I glued the same letter on the back that was on the front...and when I hung it up it said "yppah yadhtrib nosirrah" on the other side. Yeah...oops. Safe to say it got moved to a wall, ha!

I made this circle garland as well. I wanted something different than crepe streamers and liked the idea of doing circles. I cut them out on my cricut and then sewed one lonnnng running stitch through all of those suckers. It was seriously close to 500 circles and was about a 2 hour project (I think; it took me about a week of 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there...such is life these days) and cost probably $5. I was happy with the way it turned out and hopefully I can get another use out of the garland in the future.

And of course I had to add a furry photo banner to the fireplace of my little mister throughout his 2nd year of life.

Here is the table. Some of the pictures didn't turn out so great because of the light coming in through the window, but what can you do.

This little guy was one of the main reasons I hopped on board the Cookie Monster Train (other than the fact that my son loves him and all, blah blah blah :)).  The eyes are candy melts and the eyeballs are sliced chocolate chips glued on with icing. Then I just shoved half of a chips ahoy cookie in his "mouth" and piped on the icing with a grass/hair tip. Isn't he so adorably cute? Or as Cookie Monster would say, om nom nommable?

And because I had already made a batch of the Cookie Monster cupcakes for Harrison to take to school and I didn't have time or muscle strength in my hand to pipe 50 more for the party, I decided to bake a batch of these blue velvet beauties as well. Don't adjust your monitor folks, they are really that blue. They are also incredibly delicious, if I do say so myself. I found the recipe here and it is so worth whipping them up from scratch. Not to mention the frosting has 2 packages of cream cheese, 2 sticks of butter, 4 cups of powdered sugar and some vanilla...I mean come on, how could you possibly go wrong with that? You just can't.

More pictures of the dozens and dozens of cookies. If I had to estimate, we baked a total of close to THIRTY dozen cookies. And that doesn't even count the packaged goodies like the oreos and animal cookies. Insane, right? Also insane? There really weren't that many leftovers. Apparently there were quite a few cookie monsters at the party.

 I found the individual milk bottles and vintage paper straws here and loved the finishing touch they gave. I also loved that they were plastic because glass and toddlers? They don't really go together. My MIL had these antique milk bottles and I filled them up with plain milk, chocolate milk, and strawberry milk. I threw in a few juice boxes (Sesame Street, no less) for good measure:

Another shot of the cupcakes. And if you're wondering, which I have no doubt you are, they come out a similar shade of blue that they go in as. Made for some very interesting diaper changing sessions...that's all I'm gonna say about that. What? I've already said too much?

I wanted to keep the food toddler-friendly. We served the classic pb&j sandwiches, chick-fil-a nuggets, fruit, cheese and crackers, goldfish, and a tray of cookie dough dip with assorted cookies/crackers for dipping. To continue the Sesame Street-ish theme, some of the cheese was cut out into "H"s and "2"s and the goldfish were served in a fish bowl, circa Dorothy the goldfish (a recurring character from the Elmo's World segment, for all of you who fortunate folks who may be not-so-familiar with Sesame Street). We ordered 200 nuggets. I thought for sure this would be way too many, but nope. They all got eaten. Every. Last. One. People don't play games when it comes to chicken nuggets.

For favors, I just added text to a picture of Harrison and ordered favor bags from the same store as the milk bottles. If you can't read it from the picture, it says Please fill a bag to take home and eat, thanks for making my 2nd birthday so sweet! {you get cookies}. I made the labels in Word to match his invitation. They read brought to you by the letter H and the number 2!

Here are my babes, dressed and ready to par-tay!

I couldn't have pulled the party off without the help of these ladies. Here they are with last minute preparations:

And now for the massive photo dump!

Harrison hugging his first friend to arrive, Grayson.

Rick, jamming out

Steven, striking a pose.

My cousin Michelle and the birthday boy

Who knew balloons were so much fun?!

Sweet Christian

The always beautiful Stacie

The grandparents!

Erin, Trina with Erin's cutie Sammy, and Rachel

Tobias

Jeff, Katie, & Hollyn

Ashley

Zion, looking annoyed at me for interrupting his fun :)

I think Harper was crushing on Noah. They kept passing this toy back and forth.

Hmmm, Son. Those glasses may be a smidge too small.

Harper and Mamaw

I wanted to have one activity for the kids to do so I decided on cookie decorating. I figured the tots hadn't had enough sugar already! :)

I was trying to give up my control freak tendencies and let the boys do their own icing :)

Time to bring out the sprinkles

The best part about cookie decorating? You get to eat the finished product!

Madilyn and Harrison

How cute is a miniature picnic table full of toddlers?

Harrison took a break from his harmonica playing to listen to everybody sing to him and to blow out his candles. He started trying to blow them out from the second he saw me lighting them across the room. So stinkin' cute.








He blew them both out and then swiftly went back to playing his harmonica. Silly kid. :)

After cupcakes, he was pretty stoked to open his presents! And even though I told parents not to bring gifts the kid scored big. I'm not sure our play room can house another single toy. What's that? Christmas is in 2 weeks? Uh oh.

It's safe to say that Harrison was quite pooped out after all the fun.

It was a great day. Thanks to everybody who helped bring it together and who came to celebrate my sweet little 2 year old!