Coco's Flamingo Pool Party 1st Birthday

Colette had her 1st Birthday party this past weekend at our neighborhood pool. I turned to Etsy and had this awesome invite created.

Address goes in the middle box.

I had to order another custom cake from Eileen the cake lady. This is the smash cake.

The ombre upside down ruffle cake. The top layer was vanilla with lemon butter cream filling. The bottom was chocolate with cookies and cream filling. The flamingo toppers came off ebay.

Auntie Shelly purchased this gorgeous bow for Coco bean. Someone wasn't a fan for very long though.

Swimsuit is a mudpie via amazon. She had an adorable matching dress but we just never changed her into it.

Hadley was our bow wearer for the rest of the party.

 She even wore an adorable flamingo dress over her swim suit.

We set up a pop-up tent and fans to keep flys and not melt the cake. David of course was the mastermind behind the setup. It worked so good though, because it was a scorcher out. Max has a flamingo bathing suit on, but not sure I took a pic of him close up.

Dancing time.

We brought the blow up pool thinking she would be happy splashing in there so we could grill the food and socialize, but in true 1st birthday diva behavior she just kept climbing out.

Gigi and Coco in their matching flamingo outfits.

It worked out great to grill the food right by our party location. Adam and Christie just had their baby so David had to take the grilling duties on (normally Adam is our griller).

We kept decor simple with mostly pink table cloths and a few bigger flamingo findings.

I got these great flamingo drink holders from oriental trading. They are very cool until you try to put them in the water like you think they should be used for... Tipped right over. We tried numerous types of beverages.

Most exciting of all was our cousin Heather returned from a year in China teaching abroad! She literally got off a plane or 2 from traveling 30 hours, grabbed a shower? and came to the party! We were so glad she did. We missed her!

2 day old baby Owen even made his first public appearance!

Had to demonstrate our beverage holders.

 

 Family cake photo. You can kind of see Max's trunks here.

Singing Happy Birthday and Max helping to blow out the candle.

She says ok can I dig in now... Check out her hand sampling the goods.

Home girl likes to eat some cake. She just takes her time in doing it. We could have left her for a few hours and she would have been happy.

 

A few of the happy guests watching Colette. 

I broke a piece of actual cake off to give to her and she enjoyed that as well. Auntie Gina sneaking a pic with the birthday girl.

 

We are so thankful for everyone that came to the party. I was too busy wrangling a crazy 1 year old to take any more photos of guests, but all of David's family came to celebrate, plus a few neighbor friends and family. We can never do anything small, it's just not how we roll. We are so lucky to be so close to everyone! 

Still waiting on her official 1 year pics to do an official post, but she went to the doctor this week and she is healthy as can be. Love you Coco bean!

Easter Egg Hunting 2015

Max participated in many Easter egg hunts this year. I think 4 total.

I won't bore you with alllll the photos, but you get to see some. This is from our neighborhood egg hunt.

Off he goes!

 

The kids skipped over an egg so I put Colette down and she grabbed it right up.

It was so sunny today and yes our grass stays dead until it's ready to be spring soon.

Max was pretty excited about what he would find in all the eggs.

It doesn't look like any other kids were there, but there was about 12 of them. This is Max's buddy Chase checking out his goods.

Cheese faces.

Silly face.

And just to add some confusion, Max had his egg hunt at school and I put him in the same shirt. Hey, when your kid wants to wear a dress shirt and usually refuses to put one on, you let him put the same one he just wore.

One of Max's best buddies.

Another best buddy and he got hot so nice shirt off.

Best class pic we could get. haah Landon looks like he is stuffing his face already.

We also had Chase over to dye Eggs. It was Windy's idea and perfect timing because we needed some motivation to get it done.

Colette was hanging for a bit with the kiddos and daddy.

She kept getting restless and she is usually in bed by 7:30pm and gets cranky girl. She loved hanging out with Windy and never cried.

She has a 14 month old that was with his daddy (he had an ear infection) so she's used to juggling two.

Max was very into the whole process.

Chase had a really good time dropping the eggs in the cups.

He was too busy to look up for the photo.

Colette was allowed to sit down for 2 seconds until she grabbed the newspaper as you can see and started pulling. I just love the boys concentration.

haha Yay Max!

Final product shots. The colors really did come out great. They decorated with stickers and funny faces. Thanks to my mom (which i realized we didn't take any photos of) she worked behind the scenes to boil all our eggs and get our easter egg dyes all together. It really does take a village :)

Of course no gathering is complete without a superhero show down. Stay tuned for official Easter photos of the kiddos this week. Hope you had a great Easter and weekend.