Khloe's County Fair Birthday Party: The Food

For more on the decorations for Khloe's county fair birthday party, go here.

Now on to the food!!

I wanted to make Khloe's party seem like a county fair, so we all know what that means.... really unhealthy food and some of it has to be on a stick. 

I know one little girl who sure enjoyed the cuisine.

The Menu:

• Hot Dogs
• Corn Dogs
• Pasta Salad
• Potato Salad
• potato chips
• Cupcakes
• Waffle Cones w/ Neapolitan Ice Cream
• Mini Pies
• Donut holes on a stick
• Popcorn
• Funnel cake bites
• S'mores on a stick
• Cotton candy
• Lemonade
• Pop

Since I was making most of the food, I knew it would be overwhelming to do it all at once.  So, I took a tip from my momma and made the cupcakes and pies a week early.  I didn't ice the cupcakes yet, so I could just pop them all in a freezer bag and put them in the freezer.  It worked out great, plus, cupcakes are way easier to ice when they're cold.

I wanted most of the focus to be on the sweets, so I kept the main meal simple with only hot dogs, corn dogs, potato salad, pasta salad and chips.  

The sweets were the star of the show.  I had a blast making all of it.  

My favorite were the s'mores on a stick.  I put three marshmallows on a stick, dipped them in chocolate and then rolled them in graham cracker crumbs.

The popcorn was in these cute little yellow containers I found at Oriental Trading.

I didn't want to be stuck behind the table scooping out ice cream the whole time Khloe eating her smash cake, so I had Chris make me this little beauty.  It's just a cardboard box that I wrapped in kraft paper and Chris drilled holes in.  I scooped the ice cream into the waffle cones before the party, stuck them in the box and then set the whole box down in my deep freezer.  When it was time for cake and ice cream, I just carried the whole box out and voila... instant ice cream cones.

I made all of the cakes and pies as well as the cupcake picks.  

Khloe's smash cake was mostly wasted.... thank God... can you imagine if she ate this whole thing??

Mini pies were made in a cupcake pan.  They were super simple with refrigerated pie crust and store bought cherry and apple pie filling.

I'll be posting a tutorial soon about how I made the cake plates.

That's it for the food.  I have one more birthday post after this.  We have to talk about the games and the favors :)  

-Brooke

The Big 1: Khloe's County Fair Birthday Party: The Decorations

My baby is a year old.  Those words don't even feel right coming out of my mouth...or fingers, I guess.  She's talking, walking, making jokes (in her own way)... she says something in baby talk and then laughs out loud at herself.  Everything she does makes me smile. 

Okay, now that I'm nice and weepy.... let's get to the fun stuff.  This party that has consumed all of my waking, non-working moments for the past three months.  I knew I wanted to go with a county fair theme.  I figured at this point, Khloe doesn't know what she likes and what she doesn't like, so at the risk of sounding selfish, this one was for me.   Okay it is selfish.... I know that all of her parties from now on will probably be Mickey Mouse, Sesame Street, Sophia the First..... you get the point.  But this one (since she didn't have a preference) I did the way I wanted.

As I started to edit photos for this post, I realized that I had picked out nearly 100 photos to share.... so I decided to break this into multiple posts.  And maybe cut down on some of the pictures :) 

Here is what the invitations looked like.  Of course, I took out our address.  I don't really want everyone on the internets to know that :)  I made these using GIMP.  I may have mentioned GIMP before, but it is seriously greatness.  It's basically a free version of Photoshop.  Yeah... I said free...

So let's get down to it then.  First off, the decorations.

Theme: Old Fashioned County Fair
Color Scheme: Yellow and Blue

We had the party in our yard.  When you first walked up to the party, you were greeted by a hay bale and with a sign for Khloe's County Fair.  I made the sign by stenciling pallet boards.

We had different tables each different station.  Our tables/stations were:

Cake/ Favors
Gifts
Food- Had an EAT pallet sign
Sweets- Had a SWEETS pallet sign
Lemonade Stand- Had a LEMONADE STAND pallet sign

Here is the cake table. Complete with cake stands that I made.  I'll post a tutorial later on how to make your own.

Lemonade stand table for the drinks.

Sweets table!  This one was my favorite.  It had all of our county fair goodies on it. I wrapped up two shoe boxes in kraft paper to put the stick goodies on.

Khloe had her own little birthday girl area.  Her high chair had pennants that I made from scrapbook paper.  I had my wonderfully tall husband tie two strings in between the trees.  On the top string, he tied the tissue ball I had made.  On the bottom, I made a photo timeline of all of her monthly pictures held up by clothes pins.

 

I put some photos on her gift table to give it a little razzle dazzle :)

 

On the seating tables, I made a runner out of some carnival tickets and made little mason jar/ sunflower centerpieces. 

By the way, I was determined to have blue gingham tablecloths and I couldn't find them anywhere!!  I was getting so frustrated.  Finally I found a roll of blue gingham tablecloths at Oriental Trading.  So, for all of you losing your minds trying to find these, here is a link :) http://www.orientaltrading.com/api/search?Ntt=blue+gingham+tablecloth

I'll be back with another post shortly with more party details!

-Brooke

For part 2 of this post- click here!

11 months

Sigh.... my little baby bear is now 11 months old.  I am in MAJOR birthday party planning mode!  I'll save all of my sobby, crying my eyes out comments until she is a year.   It's already hitting me hard that my baby won't be a baby anymore.... but for now, I'll just share her 11 month pictures.

We went out to the yard with a mirror and tried to capture some girly pictures!

 

 

And off comes the bow...

 

 

 
After a wardrobe adjustment.... the bow is back on....

 

 

 
And here's where it started to go downhill.... she found a stick....

 

 

 
I almost deleted this picture, but I'm so glad I didn't.  This picture perfectly describes my little tom-boy.  The bow is in the background, she has a tutu on digging in the dirt :)

 
And this one really shows how rotten she is, even though it isn't perfect, she's already shed her bow and she's already gotten dirty, this may just be my favorite one.

 

-Brooke

Mommy Baby Pictures- Tips for Self Portraits

I’ve been wanting some mommy baby pictures.  I mean wanting them bad!  Since I take a lot of pictures I thought, Oh, I’ll just set up the tripod and take a few…. yeah right.  Easier said than done.  I’ve used my tripod with the timer before and had great results.  This picture of our family for Christmas was taken using a tripod and a timer. 

 

 

So, what was different this time???  A few things.  First off, Khloe was 2 months old in the picture above.  She moved around WAY less than the squirmy little 10 month old that she is now.  Second, Chris was in the picture above. 

When you take pictures with a timer, the camera focuses when you push down the shutter button.  When I was setting up the tripod to take our Christmas pictures, I focused on Chris, pushed the button and ran in front of the camera.  The result- in focus pictures.  When I was taking pictures of just Khloe and I, it was nearly impossible to get us in focus.  I could focus on Khloe when setting up the tripod, but she’s so close to the ground that it wouldn’t focus on me when I got into the picture.  And there was no way for me to focus if I wanted pictures of us standing up. 

I tried and tried and tried to get a decent picture of us.  I actually tried for 2 days in a row.  The first day, I got 1 decent picture.  The second day, one more decent one with the tripod, still nothing I loved.  I was getting so frustrated which made Khloe frustrated.  I was to the point of tears.  Literally.  Finally, Chris came home.  He took over the camera for a few minutes and got some decent shots.  I still don’t consider these “amazing” and I’ll probably bribe him into taking more when I go to take her 1 year pictures.  But they kept me from tears J

 

 

Through all of my despair (I’m may be a bit of a drama queen) I did manage to take a few things away from my impromptu mommy baby photo shoot. 

1.       Use a remote and set the camera on a 2 second delay.  When using a remote, the camera focuses before each picture.  So, since I would have been in front of the camera, it would have focused on me.  By setting the camera on a 2 second delay it gives you 2 seconds to hide the remote before the picture is taken.  Why didn’t I do this?  My remote batteries were dead.  L

2.       If you don’t have a remote and have to use the timer, get someone to stand in for you while you focus the camera.  Had Chris been home, I would have had him stand with Khloe and I would have focused on him.  Then I could have ran over and taken his place.  Luckily when he got home last night, he was willing to take the pictures, so I didn’t have to go this route. 

3.       If using a timer, set the camera to take 10 (or more) pictures at once.  This way if you blink or are flipping your hair (which I realized I do A LOT) there will be other pictures and all that running back and forth wasn’t worthless.

4.       Relax!  Especially when taking pictures with kids.  They can feel the tension and it makes them tense too.  When Khloe finally laid her head on my chest in the last picture, both of us were exhausted.  I need to repeat this to myself over and over every day.  Not only for pictures. 

5.       Have fun!  You’re not trying to catch the perfect picture, you’re trying to capture memories.  I need to remind myself of this one too J

 

 

And just for giggles, here's an outtake photo that didn't make the cut :)

-Brooke

We Have a Yard!! Whoop Whoop!!

Time for a yard update!!  We have made some MAJOR improvements outside our house since last September.  We’ve had some issues with our yard.  The spot we chose to build on is a nice piece of flat land on top of a mountain.  If you’re familiar with West Virginia, you know how amazing it is to find a large flat lot.  If you’re not familiar with West Virginia, let me give you a little idea of the landscape here.  (Look behind us)

 

You may think of us as crazy for wanting to live somewhere with so many mountains, and to be honest, the winter commute is…. interesting to say the least.  But there is something that draws me to these mountains.  My childhood memories aren’t of beaches, they’re of hiking through the woods and climbing mountains.  They’re not of palm trees, they’re of big oaks and cherry trees and apple trees.  They’re not of salt water, they’re of rivers and streams.  This is who I am.  I do and always will belong in these mountains.   Chris feels the exact same way, we’re both West Virginians born and raised.  So when we got married and began to plan our life, there was never a question of moving out of West Virginia.  We knew we would live here.  Okay… now that I’ve thoroughly shown my inner thoughts about WV, back to the yard update.

 When we decided to build here, the lot looked like this.

 

 

 

Nothing but woods, woods and more woods.  But it was flat underneath all of those trees and we could see the potential.  The first step was to have the property logged.  We own 10 acres up here and we wanted to have some woods, so we had about 3 logged.  So, what I didn’t know about logging (and really never cared to know until we got to that point) was that they take the tree trunk, but leave the stumps and the tree tops.  After they were finished logging, we were left with this.
 

We’ve been in the house for 3 years and it took us literally 2 ½ years to get all of the stumps out.  As of last Fall, this is what we were dealing with.  The picture really doesn't do it justice.  There were stumps everywhere.

 

When I had the baby in September, Chris took some time off work to be home with us.  Since it’s really, really rare for us to have time off work and be home, we took advantage of it.  We rented a super big backhoe and decided to get this thing done!  It took a week of Chris working on the backhoe for nearly 8 hours a day. 

 

When Spring rolled around, we were ready for grass.  We haven’t had a great track record with grass…  When we first moved in, we planted grass in a little area in front of the house to avoid mud.  Well, the grass grew in patches…. Then half of it died, we think there wasn’t very much top soil and it just got washed away by rain.  So the following year, we covered it all with new top soil and re-planted.  It still came in patchy, but over time it filled in.  Given our experiences, we were both surprised when we planted the whole yard and it actually grew!  All of it!  Not just patches!  We’re so happy with the yard now, it’s turned into what we dreamed it could be when we first looked at that wooded lot. 

 

We still have some landscaping we want to do, but for right now, we’re just happy to finally have a yard.  A yard with no stumps and rocks and mud :)

-Brooke