Balloons and Bubbles

I love planning my kids' birthday parties, in large part because I love anything with a theme. For Finn's 1st birthday, we had a baseball theme. We requested that all guests wear their favorite sports apparel and I made a carrot cake rendition of U.S. Cellular Field (complete with pinwheel scoreboard) that was frosted with Alton Brown's avocado frosting (don't knock it 'til you try it!):

Over the next few birthdays, we had dogs...

...and silly monsters

...and pirates.

Emmett is my March baby, and for his first birthday we went with a St. Patrick's Day theme:

Which brings us to this year - Emmett's second birthday. Emmett, like pretty much any two-year-old I know, loves balloons. We often joke we should get rid of all the toys and just buy a helium tank and a sack of balloons. He loves to dance with them and chase them and bat them around and look at us through them. So, for his birthday, we went with a balloon theme.

We held his birthday party at my parent's house, and my mom went to town putting balloons all over the house:

For the first time, I did not make the birthday cake. This broke my heart a little bit, but because we were traveling the day of the party, it made more sense to order from the bakery near my parent's house. It was delicious - chocolate cake filled with bananas and covered in white whipped cream. I asked them not to decorate it at all (they thought I was nuts) and instead filled the top with balloons - I used water balloons (filled with air, not water) tied to kebab sticks broken to different lengths.  Thanks, Pinterest, for the simple, fun idea. Emmett loved it.

You know what else two-year-olds love? Bubbles. Finn remembered this, I guess, because weeks ago he asked me if he could get Emmett a bubble machine for his birthday. We had it up in Galena and the boys had a blast dancing in the bubbles. It has since become a regular feature in our yard - anyone have a good recipe for homemade bubble solution?

 Balloons and bubbles. It's fun to be 2.