Birthday time

Summer is when we hit birthdays hard!!  I have three kids in three months and then tons of family birthdays in between.  I don't always have a party for my kids because we used to live so close to family that they came over and it was an instant party but now that we are a little further we decided to have a friend party.  I am super frugal (that's a nice way to say cheap right) so I scoured Pintrest for ideas and merged them together and tried to use as much as I could of what I already had or could make for not too much.  I think I spent around $20-25 for our party decor. 
   Have a look.  We made use of our new pool and had a pool party with a beach theme.  There are plenty of cute ideas out there and I added a few of my own.

Most of my efforts went into finding ideas for cupcakes.  I found these crab cupcakes on line.  It was hard to find all the candies they had used and so I just used orange jelly slices and cut them into the pieces I needed.  I didn't find eatable eyes so they had real googly eyes on them.  (I did warn people first though) The sand is made out of graham cracker crumbs.  For the other cupcakes Trolley candies had the octopus candies and then the others are Swedish fish.

   For party favors I bought cheap beach buckets and filled them with crayons (great time to buy them) glow sticks and bubbles.  We had invited three families and so there was a bucket for each family to take home. 

It is entirely possible I am obsessed with banners right now.  I made this one on three different strings so that I can use it will all my kids and just add a new name string when it is their birthday.  As I said we have one every month. 

 I tried to make our table of food kids friendly, easy, and colorful.  I loved the idea of decorating with freezer pops.  They are already so colorful.  I also made kid friendly sandwiches and cut the Pb&J out as fish.  The meat ones were a little too thick for my plastic cookie cutter.  Colorful cups helped with the decor and easy colorful food like jello, watermelon, and goldfish crackers.  It might not have been fine cuisine but it went over great with the kids!!

  It was such a hit that my next son wants the same party.  I think I might try and talk him into a science themed birthday though and utilize our already paid for membership at our science center.  Keep looking to find out 8).