A Halloween & Birthday Bash

What a fantastic party weekend it was! Sydney and I went to three in total, two birthday parties and one fabulous Halloween party in the middle!  It was fun times all around!

Yesterday my friend Lori hosted a family Halloween party for a group of Moms that live in the Dunbar area that met at our newborn group many months ago at the Dunbar Community Centre.  A core group of us have stayed in touch and remained friends, it's been so nice getting to know other families from the neighborhood and having Sydney's little friends so close by.

Lori is expecting her second baby in late May and is still feeling that first trimester exhaustion, so we all decided to pitch in and help make a few things to share with everyone.  I made a couple of really fun things.  This cake is called the Great Pumpkin Cake, it's a carrot cake baked in a bundt pan and then iced with orange icing to resemble a pumpkin.  The green stem in the middle is an iced flat bottom ice cream cone turned upside down.  Very cute!

I also made these ghost meringues which were super simple to do and looked so adorable!  The recipe was a simple meringue which was then placed into a pastry bag and piped onto a cookie sheet and baked.  Once cooled, you use melted chocolate to make the eyes and they look like scary little ghosts and taste oh so delicious.  They were obviously a hit at the party as they all vanished, like any good ghost, very quickly!

The spread was amazing, I also made the Jack-o-Lantern lollipops in the cup with a chocolate mold I've had for years, I dig it out every Halloween and was so happy to have an excuse to use it this year!

My friend Michelle made the cutest thing ever, she got a bunch of oranges, hollowed them out and carved them like jack-o-lanterns and then filled them with fruit salad for the kids.  It was adorable and such a healthy alternative to all of the sweets and candy that the day was filled with! 

Paul, Sydney and I had such a great time at the party, the kids were super cute all dressed up in their costumes and Lori did a little photo shoot of the kids in their costumes for us all.  It was a great memory!

This afternoon we headed off to our third party of the weekend for Sydney's little friend Myrtle who is also turning two.  It was such a lovely party, lots of Moms I knew and lots of new Moms to meet and the kids played really well together.  Myrtle's Mom, Saskia, had the most beautiful display of food, with fresh bunches of flowers in the middle and balloons dangling on top.  Sydney was fascinated with the balloons, kept asking for one the entire party through, so Saskia cut her off one to take home before we left.

 
Myrtle's Dad made this lovely chocolate cake for her birthday, it was delicious!

By sheer coincidence, Sydney ended up with a loot bag with a little ladybug on it which is the theme for her birthday coming up in a couple of weeks!  It was filled with some beautiful butterfly stickers, a Melissa and Doug finger puppet and some decadent Thomas Haas chocolates!

We played a very fun game called Pass the Parcel at the party.  It's basically like musical chairs with a parcel, if the music stops and the parcel ends up in your hands you get to unwrap one layer of wrapping paper and get whatever gift falls out, and so on and so on.  Every kid ended up with a little puppet in the end, Sydney's was a moose, very fitting seeing I am from northern BC where moose run free!

So it was a lovely weekend filled with happy memories of times with our friends celebrating.  We are feeling a little partied out after all the excitement but it was well worth it, we absolutely had a blast!