Boy has this last year gone fast! When thinking about what to do for the twins first birthday I thought about Noah's arc (you know, the 2 by 2 theme seemed appropriate), I thought about Thing 1 and Thing 2 (you know how I love this Dr. Seuss theme), and I thought about just using an alphabet theme like I did for Jack's first birthday. I thought all of them had potential but I wasn't completely excited about any of them so I kept thinking and looking for inspiration.
My creative instinct said, "Be patient, just wait, and something will come along that you'll get excited about." Be patient? Really? I kept brainstorming and ended up on one of my favorite invitation sites (this is where I have always purchased all of Jack's birthday invitations) Traylor Papers. I found double bubble invitation and something clicked, and I got excited about a double bubble party! It was something different and I was excited to see how it would all come together.
Above is an example of the invitation
I would love to give you the link for these invites but they don't sell them anymore and I have "Googled" and can't find them anywhere else. I am going to work on some double bubble invites and I'll post on the designergirl007 etsy site in the future where my other party materials are available if you would like to have a double bubble party! :)
I had the theme, now, to come up with the decorations. My sister-in-law, who I have talked about on my blog before, is super duper creative. We were talking over Christmas and she had received a cake pop book. The book was full of great ideas and once I knew the bubble gum theme I knew the cake pops would be a perfect fit. They would be the perfect little gumball shapes on top of the sticks. I also knew I could buy double bubble wrapped gum and gumballs (small and large) to decorate in bowls around the table. By the way, the cake pops are sooooo good!
This picture shows the cake pops in the different sized bowls. The sticks are pushed in styrofoam in the bowls. Some of the cake pops are plain and some have sugar sprinkles in the coordinated icing color on them. To cover the styrofoam in the bowls I used the small and large sized gumballs. I had a fun platter I piled with the wrapped gum and used a photo holder to hold one of their invitations. I had also made tags to go on a few of the cake pop sticks. I'll talk more about that in just a bit. If you are interested in making cake pops here is a video from youtube that was a lot of help to me when I made them. Here is the cake pop book my sister-in-law had that provided a lot of inspiration as well. These are so cute I can see them making a lot more appearances on my blog.
The other idea was to either have the kids do a craft using construction paper and make portraits of themselves, but because I didn't have space for that and I thought the kids would just like to play we didn't do the craft. I think they would have really enjoyed it though. What we did instead is we took our pictures, then I used Photoshop to cut out the background. I then, printed each of our pictures and cut a slit where our mouths were. Next, blew up balloons and pulled the tied part of the balloon through the slit in the paper. This helped with all the kids running around to keep the balloons in place. If I had just taped them on the photo they would have fallen off. Here are our photos - so fun!
The other fun thing I found were little double bubble gumball machines. They were party favors for the kids Jack's age and above. They loved these...
The other thing we did was we took balloons (the color of gumballs of course) and blew them up to different sizes then wrapped them in iridescent tissue paper. We tied each side of the balloon with white rafia ribbon to make it look like wrapped gum. For a final effect, hung a bunch from the ceiling, set them around by the drinks, and put them in a large glass jar above my stove to spread the theme around the kitchen.
Finally, we had the cakes, tags for the cake pops, banner and candy boxes. We had a large cake to serve everyone and then Jack picked out the small "smash" cakes for the twins. He chose a bakugan cake for Jake and a spiderman cake for josh. I am not sure who liked them more the boys or Jack? I made a banner to hang across the windows that said "Happy Birthday" on either side of the bubble gum character that is blowing bubbles centered in the middle. I will include these once I get it all pulled together and let you know where you can find the materials for your own double bubble party. I used the bubble gum character in a smaller version and printed them smaller to fit on top of little chinese take out boxes that were full of gumballs and wrapped gum. These were favors for the adults and kids as well.
This party was a lot of fun and everyone seemed to have a great time. Especially the twins, who had cake for the first time. Josh wasn't so sure about it, but Jake, well... as you can see he has a sweet tooth!
What a great first birthday party. The final thing I did was create a video that covered the boys first year. I did this with Jack and couldn't leave these boys out so I hunted and gathered photos and started putting it together. In the video I put pics from when I was pregnant up until their party. The songs I used were: Blessed by Elton John, My Wish by Rascal Flats, Forever Young by Bob Dylan, Life is a Highway by Rascal Flats and Let the Good Times Roll by Shirley and Lee. Yes, I got up at 4:15am to finish the video and cried, I laughed, as I looked back at the last year. After the boys demolished the cakes they were taken straight to the tub. After eating the cake and all that excitement they were ready for a nap. We are very blessed to have these 3 boys and what a great day of memories! Now on to year number two and as the end of my video says, "Our 3 Sons. Let the Good Times Roll!"
Forgot to mention the other thing that helped pull all this together. We were covering all senses during this party - even smell! I put the bubblegum scent in my Scentsy warmer and it smelled like bubblegum! How fun!!